The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 34 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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. …”
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”
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”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
MacAskill: Saving a child's life with bed nets costs under $10,000
“For example, by buying bed nets and distributing them to those who need them just for the, you know, single digit thousands of dollars, statistically speaking, you can save a child's life.”
MacAskill pledges over half of his lifetime earnings to charity
“I thought about how much money I needed to live on over the course of my life, and I decided, even as an academic, where I'm not going to earn as much as perhaps I could have done, I'm still going to earn much more than I need to be happy, and so what I did wa…”
MacAskill: Donating to nascent causes compounds faster than market returns
“Because often money that you donate compounds in just the same way that you return on investment if you save the money can compound. In particular, if you're investing in a small growing area often the rate of growth of that cause area can be far greater than …”
MacAskill: Some recent graduates donate roughly $1M annually through high-earning careers
“And I know a number of people who've chosen to do this, and actually just some of whom are just a few years out of college and already are able to donate on the order of a million dollars per year.”
MacAskill: Most people's passions lie in hyper-competitive fields like arts and sports
“When you look at what people are actually passionate about, the vast majority tend to be passionate about things where it's extremely hard to have a promising career. So that's the arts, that's music, that's sport, and that's not a coincidence.”
MacAskill: Proportional Income Increases Deliver Equal Welfare Value Across Income Levels
“So in general if you can increase someone's income by the same percentage, that's worth about the same, no matter how much someone's income is.”
MacAskill: Open Philanthropy is the model foundation for strategic giving
“And I just think this is the model foundation. Again, extremely transparent in terms of how they're choosing causes. Being extremely strategic in what cause areas they choose to focus on.”
MacAskill: Effective Altruism strongly promotes policy and research careers
“Money's only one, but we're very strongly encouraging people to pursue careers in policy and research and working for non-profits too.”