CxD #223: What do YOU Owe to the Future? Prince issues a warning ☔️
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~Wendell Berry
2. Interview with Will MacAskill, author of the new book What We Owe the Future:
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“The mode of ‘everything sucks’ is not helpful. Maybe it’s true, but the relevant question is: what can we do?”
How much comfort should we be willing to trade for potentially enormous gains to society?
When assessing a potentially worthy cause, EAs calculate impact using three components: importance or scale (how much good could arise from working on it), tractability (how solvable it is), and neglectedness (how overlooked it is in terms of committed resources). One result of filtering the world’s problems through a lens of where an extra dollar or hour would have the most impact is that EA donations can seem to lack any obvious connection: among Open Philanthropy’s causes are South Asian air quality, farm-animal welfare, and the risks of advanced AI.
That’s partly why he thinks it’s crucial that EA continues to have culture-setters who are serious about their moral obligations. MacAskill and Ord see it as especially important to stick to the “Further Pledge” they both took to donate not just a certain percentage of their earnings, but everything above a set sum. MacAskill currently lives on £26,000 ($31,000) a year, which is slightly above the median household income in the U.K., and the proceeds of his new book all go to the Effective Altruism Funds. “It’s a legible demonstration that I’m in this because I really care, I’m not getting any financial benefit,” he says. That kind of commitment helps signal the moral seriousness of the EA community, he hopes, and is also personally reassuring. “I might worry, am I drifting in values? OK, no, if I’m still doing these things, I guess I must still be a good person.”
Many EAs echo that sentiment: that doing something, even when the right course of action is unclear, is better than giving in to fatalism, which is often where I find myself. It can be tough to work in journalism—a field that stares right at the world’s problems—and not become cynical. When things feel particularly bleak, I sometimes tell myself that even if I had the time and energy to try to make the world better, I’d probably fail.
Effective altruists try anyway. They know it’s impossible to take the care you feel for one human and scale it up by a thousand, or a million, or a billion. Rather than getting overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem, they focus on the difference a single person can make. “Some people would think that what we do is just a drop in the bucket,” Ord says. “But it doesn’t really matter what size the bucket is. If what you can do in your life involves really saving hundreds of lives, or transforming the lives of hundreds or thousands of people, that’s just as big no matter how many other people need help.”
That EA is more comfortable meeting people where they are is probably why it’s taken off in a way that Singer’s arguments haven’t in the past 50 years. “EA doesn’t require you to refashion your sense of self,” Berger tells me. “You can have a lot of impact without becoming a radical ascetic.”
“It’s both not realistic and probably not desirable to be so absolutist about this that you don’t have other significant pulls in your life,” she says. “We all need to make decisions that work for us as humans and not as if we’re only optimizing machines.”
In the days that follow, I find myself thinking of that conversation—of the moments in my life that have shimmered with beauty and joy and love and laughter, and the stability and safety that made those moments more possible. I think of all the people alive right now who deserve to have such moments, and all the lives still to come that could be so much better and richer in meaning—or so much worse. If that depends on what we all do in the next few decades, I don’t know exactly how to help ensure our actions are for the better. But if the future could be as vast and good as MacAskill thinks, it seems worth trying.
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