Insight
MacAskill: Charities survive without impact because donors are disconnected from beneficiaries
“In the case of the for-profit world, there's a kind of natural evolutionary mechanism. The companies that aren't able to turn a profit will eventually die. You know, the bad companies will get kind of kicked, you know, will get killed effectively, but that doe…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
MacAskill: The top charities achieve up to 1000x more positive impact
“We have some charities that can do, you know, hundreds of thousands of times more good than others which is an amazing opportunity if you are trying to do the most good but at the same time is indicative of the fact that it's just very hard to tell between the…”
Insight
MacAskill: Passion stems from mastering a subject rather than preceding it
“Passion tends to result from mastery of a subject or mastery of an area rather than vice versa.”
Insight
MacAskill: AI creates severe risk when optimizing improperly specified goals
“There's significant risks that the, you develop artificial intelligences where you haven't specified their goals properly, and they don't do what you want. You give them more power, and that results in very bad outcomes because they optimize for what they've b…”
Insight
MacAskill: Philanthropy is a last line of defense for market and democratic failures
“Philanthropy is really that, like, last line of defense, as it were, where you've both got a kind of market failing and democratic failing, and I think that applies for people in very poor countries who, you know, they don't get a vote over who's U.S. Presiden…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
MacAskill: Direct Cash Transfers Are Extremely Effective and Often Beat Traditional Aid
“The huge amount of spending goes on, and we don't even know whether that spending, such as buying livestock or providing wells or providing textbooks, is actually having more of an impact than simply giving poor people cash, which is the simplest thing to do. …”
Assertion Supported
MacAskill: Birth country and parental wealth dictate 80% of personal income
“80% of the income that people earn is explained by the country of birth and socioeconomic status of their parents”
Assertion Contradicted
MacAskill: The poorest people in the US or Canada are in the top 10-15% globally
“Even the very poor in the United States, for example, or Canada, They're still in the richest 10 to 15% of the world's population”
Assertion Supported
MacAskill: The 'Scared Straight' juvenile intervention program actively increased crime rates
“And what they discovered was not only was the program ineffective, it was actively harmful. So the juveniles who went through this program would go on to commit more crimes, you know, that's more thefts, more rapes, more murders if they had gone through this p…”
Insight
MacAskill: Charitable impact varies vastly even among programs that work
“You can have the absolute best of intentions. You can be really meaning to do good. But then firstly, you can often just fail to have any sort of impact at all. But then secondly, even within those programs that work well, there's often just a vast discrepancy…”
Insight
MacAskill: The best charitable giving opportunities are decreasing over time
“And also just because the world's getting richer, there's more and more smart money in philanthropy. And in general, the best giving opportunities are going down over time.”
Insight
MacAskill: Overhead ratio is a poor metric for charity effectiveness
“The overheads ratio. The amount that a charity spends on administration costs rather than program costs. And we, for a long time, have said that that's just a really poor metric if you want to actually try and do as much good as possible. Because imagine if yo…”
Insight
MacAskill: Effective Altruism cannot rely solely on RCTs and quantification
“And in those areas, you just often don't have randomized control trials. Often you need to use, you know, less quantitative evidence, but that's okay. That doesn't rule that out. Not everything can be quantified.”
Insight
MacAskill: High-earning corporate careers often generate more impact than non-profit work
“So often you can actually have more of an impact by going into A higher earning career and donating a very significant proportion of your earnings than you can by simply working at a nonprofit.”
Opinion
MacAskill: Many cause areas are talent-constrained rather than funding-constrained
“And in fact, for many cause areas, I think the More constrained by having really good people, really talented people than by having just, you know, additional money on the margin.”
Opinion
MacAskill: Strongly favors limited-life foundations over perpetual endowments
“I'm extremely pro limited life foundations and very skeptical of perpetual foundations where within that I'd include universities as well.”
Opinion
MacAskill: Harvard and Stanford should spend their endowments rather than fundraising
“It kind of baffles me that organizations, that, yeah, organizations like Harvard and Stanford are requesting donations from their alumni while at the same time sitting on an endowment of thirty-five billion dollars that they could be spending down.”
Insight
MacAskill: Most global problems should not be addressed through philanthropy
“In a sense, I think that most problems in the world shouldn't be addressed with philanthropy.”
Insight
MacAskill: Taxes Differ from Charity by Funding Income-Enabling Public Goods
“The taxes that you're paying is like contributing to a well-functioning society. That is precisely what allows you to make that money in the first place. And therefore, I think that's kind of very different from charity.”
Insight
MacAskill: Foreign Aid Counts as Charity, Domestic Tax Spending Does Not
“Especially from countries like Sweden and the UK, the money that they send on overseas development aid. You know, sometimes that's politically motivated, it's political gains, and different countries vary in how how much that's due with their foreign aid spend…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
MacAskill: Global health aid massively outperforms economic development aid
“So if you look at the past 50 years of aid spending, the track record of spending on economic development is really very mixed. You know, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The track record of spending on global health is just outstanding.”
Insight
MacAskill: Equal Disagreement With Smart Peers Demands Ambivalence
“If, I believe something, and I meet someone who I think is just as smart and just as well reasoned in this case as me, and they believe the opposite. Well, then I just become ambivalent, because this person's as likely to be right as I am.”
Insight
MacAskill: Radical Honesty Fails by Ignoring Language's Symbolic Meaning
“Going all out in terms of radical honesty is not appreciating the kind of symbolic aspect of language. It's just kind of, it's like somewhat too narrow, too literalist in terms of how it understands language.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
MacAskill: 21st-century human activity could cause civilizational collapse or extinction
“There's very, very many ways in which the activities that we, that humanity will likely do over the 21st century could lead to global catastrophe, civilizational collapse, or even extinction.”
William MacAskill