[Book] What We Owe the Future — William MacAskill

TL;DR. Positive moral change is not inevitable. It’s the result of long , hard work by generations of thinkers and activists. Who should this movement consist of ? Well — if not you , then who ? And if not now , when ?

Applicable to me

• Choosing a problem. When choosing a problem, think about its cost / tractability, and its benefits [importance, marginal benefit (is it a neglected problem?), contingency (would someone else solve it in the short run if not me?)]
• Donate. Instead of focusing on personal behavior changes, the time is better spent on computing how to donate more.
• Spread good ideas. Make it a moral responsibility to spread good ideas. If you convince someone to do as much good as you intend to do with your life, then you would have doubled your life’s work.
• Adopt the community mindset to problem solving. You are not alone in making the world a better place. Adopting the community mindset justifies altruism, specialization, experimentation, recording of failures, and is an antidote to powerlessness.

Notable quotes

Why care about future people. Distance in time is like distance in space . People matter even if they live thousands of miles away . Likewise , they matter even if they live thousands of years hence . In both cases , it’s easy to mistake distance for unreality , to treat the limits of what we can see as the limits of the world . But just as the world does not stop at our doorstep or our country’s borders , neither does it stop with our generation , or the next .

Why _you_ should care.

• If we are to meet these challenges and ensure that civilisation at the end of this century is pointed in a positive direction , then a movement of morally motivated people , concerned about the whole scope of the future , is a necessity , not an optional extra . Who should this movement consist of ? Well — if not you , then who ? And if not now , when ?
• Positive moral change is not inevitable . It’s the result of long , hard work by generations of thinkers and activists . And if there’s any change that’s not inevitable , it’s concern for future people — people who , by virtue of their location in time , are utterly disenfranchised in the world today .

Why care now

• At the beginning. If humanity survives to even a fraction of its potential life span , then , strange as it may seem , we are the ancients : we live at the very beginning of history , in the most distant past . What we do now will affect untold numbers of future people .
• Highest rate of change. it’s not just that rates of economic growth are historically unusual ; the same is true for rates of energy use , carbon dioxide emissions , land use change , scientific advancement , and arguably moral change , too .
• Most malleable. The fact that these changes are so recent means , moreover , that we are out of equilibrium : society has not yet settled down into a stable state , and we are able to influence which stable state we end up in .

Choosing a problem: importance / benefit, tractability / cost, neglectedness / maginal benefit.

• First , tractability : How many resources would it take to solve a given fraction of the problem ?
• The second component is neglectedness . The greater the number of people working on a problem , the more likely it is that the low — hanging fruit — the best opportunities to do good — will be taken .
• Contingency as a prioritization metric Considering contingency is crucial because if you make a change to the world but it’s a change that would have simply happened soon afterward anyway , then you have not made a longterm difference to the world . … Multiplying significance , persistence , and contingency together gives us the longterm value of bringing about some state of affairs .

How: Donate, spread good ideas, vote.

• Beyond donations , three other personal decisions seem particularly high impact to me : political activism , spreading good ideas , and having children .
• Donate > personal behavior changes. People often focus on personal behaviour or consumption decisions . … this emphasis , though understandable , is a major strategic blunder for those of us who want to make the world better . Why: our consumption is not optimized for doing harm , and so by making different consumption choices we can avoid at most the modest amount of harm we’d be otherwise causing ; by contrast , when donating we can choose whichever action best reduces the harm we care about . E.g. this donation would reduce the world’s carbon dioxide emissions by an expected three thousand tonnes per year . 21 This is far bigger than the effect of going vegetarian for your entire life .
• Voting: high expected value. The simplest form of political activism is voting . … even if the chance that you influence an election is small , the expected value can still be very high .
• Spread ideas. Another way to improve the world is to talk to your friends and family about important ideas , like better values or issues around war , pandemics , or AI . … Spreading these ideas can be an enormously powerful way of having an impact . Suppose that you convince just one other person to do as much good as you otherwise would have done in your life . Well , then you’ve done your life’s work .
• Create for long-term. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public , but was done to last for ever .
• Tips: Do good things, gather options, learn. These three lessons — take robustly good actions , build up options , and learn more — can help guide us in our attempts to positively influence the long term .

Career choice: experiment, build skills. by far the most important decision you will make , in terms of your lifetime impact , is your choice of career .

• Be ready for change. Even your personal preferences are likely to change — probably more than you expect .
• Experiment. All of this means that it’s valuable to view your career like an experiment — to imagine you are a scientist testing a hypothesis about how you can do the most good . In practical terms , you might follow these steps : 1 . Research your options . 2 . Make your best guess about the best longer — term path for you . 3 . Try it for a couple of years . 4 . Update your best guess . 5 . Repeat . Rather than feeling locked in to one career path , you would see it is an iterative process in which you figure out the role that is best for you and best for the world .
• Joy. But the specific path that works best for you depends on your personal fit . Some people are happiest locked away for months on end researching abstruse topics in economics or computer science ,
• Accessibility. You might also have some unique opportunities that other people don’t have . … focusing on where you personally , with all your unique skills and abilities , can make the biggest difference on the world’s most pressing problems .

Think community v.s. individuals.

• Group-level efficiency. The fact that we each act as part of a wider community warrants a “ portfolio approach ” to doing good — taking the perspective of how the community as a whole can maximize its impact . Then you can ask what you can do to move the community closer to an ideal allocation of resources , given everyone’s personal fit and comparative advantage . Taking a community perspective , the primary question becomes not “ How can I personally have the biggest impact ? ” but “ Who in the community is relatively best placed to do what ? ”
• Help others. because this community has a shared aim of doing the most good , I have reasons to help others in the community even if I do not receive anything in return .
• The portfolio approach can also give greater value to experimentation and learning . If one person pursues an unexplored path to impact ( such as an unusual career choice ) , everyone else in the community gets to learn whether that path was successful or not . It can also give much greater value to specialisation :
• Antidote to powerlessness. The portfolio approach also makes it easier to see how you can have an impact . If you only consider what you personally might be able to achieve , it is easy to feel powerless in the face of huge international problems like climate change and engineered pathogens . But if you instead ask “ Would we make progress on the threat from engineered pandemics if there were hundreds of motivated and smart people working on it ? ” I think it becomes clear that the answer is yes .

Interesting notes on civilization

• Survival risks. three ways of ensuring survival , dedicating a chapter to each . The first way is to prevent direct risks of human extinction ; I focus on engineered pandemics . The second is to prevent the unrecovered collapse of civilisation ; I focus on risks from nuclear war and extreme climate change . The third is technological stagnation , which could increase the risks of both extinction and collapse .
• Beware: value lock-in. value lock — in : an event that causes a single value system , or set of value systems , to persist for an extremely long time . … What we want to do is build a morally exploratory world : one structured so that , over time , the norms and institutions that are morally better are more likely to win out , leading us , over time , to converge on the best possible society .
• Stagnation. In a recent article called “ Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find ? , ” economists from Stanford and LSE analysed this phenomenon quantitatively . progress becomes harder and harder . Based on their numbers , in order to double our overall level of technological advancement , we need to put in , conservatively , four times as much research effort as we did for the previous doubling .
• Religion’s persistence On average , atheists have few children compared to the religious , especially fundamentalists and those in poorer countries . Over time , this matters . According to the Pew Research Center , by 2050 the proportion of people with no religious affiliation ( which includes atheists , agnostics , and people who do not identify with any religion but who may hold some religious or spiritual beliefs ) will decrease from 16 percent to 13 percent of the world population . The primary reason for this is the higher fertility rate among religious groups ; conversions in and out of a religion play a surprisingly small role in total numbers .
• Happiness, skippable moments. It turns out that people in the survey , on average , would skip around 40 percent of their day if they could .
• “ A society grows great when old men plant trees under whose shade they will never sit . ”

Hot takes

• Neuron-count-based weighting of wellbeing. To capture the importance of differences in capacity for wellbeing , we could , as a very rough heuristic , weight animals ’ interests by the number of neurons they have .
• Have more kids. But increasingly , people are starting to see the choice to have children as an unethical one because having children means greater carbon dioxide emissions and faster climate change . I think this is a mistake . Children have positive effects as well as negative ones . In addition to the direct positive impacts on their family and the friends they will make , when children grow up they contribute to public goods through their taxes , they build infrastructure , and they develop and champion new ideas about how to live and how to structure society . In the last chapter we saw that the recent decline in fertility might lead to a long period of stagnation , extending the time of perils . Having kids can help mitigate this risk .
• Go to space. If future civilisation will be good enough , then we should not merely try to avoid near — term extinction . We should also hope that future civilisation will be big . If future people will be sufficiently well — off , then a civilisation that is twice as long or twice as large is twice as good . The practical upshot of this is a moral case for space settlement .

More quotes here