Estimating the long-term impact of our actions today (with Will MacAskill)

Sep 7, 2022 1h 6m 18 insights Episode Page ↗
Spencer Greenberg speaks with Will MacAskill, author of "What We Owe the Future," about long-termism, an ethical stance prioritizing the long-term future. They discuss its implications for doing good, handling uncertainty, and the challenges of calculating expected value in altruism.
Actionable Insights

1. Prioritize Long-Term Future

Take seriously the moral importance and vast scale of the long-term future by identifying and acting on events in your lifetime that can steer civilization towards a better path for future generations.

2. Value Future Generations Equally

Acknowledge that future generations have significant moral worth, similar to people in the present, and that their vast potential numbers mean actions impacting them can have an enormously greater scale of positive effect.

3. Prioritize Existential Risk Reduction

Dedicate significant effort to reducing existential risks (e.g., human extinction, totalitarian lock-in), as these are highly impactful regardless of whether one adopts a long-termist or short-termist perspective.

4. Preserve Future Optionality

Actively work to give future generations as much optionality as possible, rather than passively allowing current events to constrain their potential futures, especially regarding risks like bioweapons or AI.

5. Make Long-Term Impact a Key Priority

Consider positively impacting the long-term future as a key priority among many, rather than the sole priority, given current societal underinvestment in this area.

6. Practice Robust Altruism

Engage in actions that are beneficial across a wide variety of possible future scenarios and worldviews, rather than focusing solely on interventions that only look good under a narrow set of assumptions.

7. Invest in Pandemic Preparedness

Support and invest in robust interventions like early detection systems, advanced PPE, rapid vaccine deployment, and sterilizing technologies (e.g., far UVC light) to protect against future pandemics, as these are reliably good across various scenarios.

8. Focus on Predictable Long-Term Impacts

Identify and act on interventions with predictable long-term impacts, such as reducing existential risks like human extinction, as these effects persist indefinitely and do not wash out over time.

9. Embrace Intellectual Humility

Cultivate a nuanced perspective on complex topics, acknowledging uncertainty and being open to the possibility that your current beliefs might be false, especially when advocating for high-stakes ideas.

10. Implement Epsilon-Greedy Altruism

Allocate a significant majority of resources to what is currently believed to be most important, while reserving a smaller fraction for exploratory projects to discover new, potentially high-impact opportunities.

11. Diversify Altruistic Efforts

Adopt a diversified approach to doing good by spreading efforts across multiple important cause areas, rather than going all-in on a single ‘most important’ thing, due to inherent uncertainties and the likelihood of priorities changing.

12. Invest in Intellectual Inquiry

Prioritize intellectual inquiry and research to gain a better understanding of complex issues, such as the validity and implications of long-termism, acknowledging that current priorities might change with new knowledge.

13. Build Altruistic Resources

Focus on growing communities and resources that are careful, reflective, cooperative, and morally motivated, as this will be beneficial even if specific priorities shift in the future.

14. Combine Expected Value with Heuristics

While performing back-of-the-envelope calculations for expected value is useful, also pay attention to heuristics like learning opportunities and personal strengths, as humans are imperfect reasoners.

15. Skepticism Towards Highest EV

Be skeptical of interventions estimated to have the highest expected value, as noise and errors in reasoning can systematically bias estimates upwards, making the chosen action seem better than it truly is.

16. Act on Medium Probabilities

Take seriously actions that address medium-sized probabilities (e.g., 0.5% to 20%) of very large negative outcomes, as these are significant risks that warrant substantial investment and effort, similar to how we approach plane safety.

17. Contribute to Collective Efforts

Engage in collective actions (like protests or organizational lobbying) where individual contributions, though having a low probability of being the sole difference-maker, can still be justified by the very large stakes involved.

18. Leverage Flow-Through Effects

Consider excelling in an area where you can have a strong positive impact, even if it’s not directly related to your ultimate priority, as positive flow-through effects can indirectly contribute more than a mediocre direct effort.