William MacAskill: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. Actually, my understanding of human beings — rather than homo economicus, which are mainly motivated by self-interest; you understand that in terms of income — at least when you’re looking at a much broader scale, I think we’re much more like homo culturalis, where people have a view of how the world should be, and they go out and try to make that vision happen. I think that can have hard-to-measure and very long-run but important effects. I actually see effective altruism, as a whole, as cultural innovation. It’s creating this new subculture, a culture of people who are impartial and altruistically motivated, extremely concerned about the truth and having accurate beliefs. That is a way in which I think effective altruism could have a big impact, in the same way as the scientific revolution was primarily a cultural revolution — I shouldn’t use that term — primarily a revolution in culture, where people suddenly started innovating, and they started to think in a certain way. It’s was like, “Oh, we can do experiments, and we can test things, and we can tinker.” I actually see effective altruism as a cultural innovation that could drive great moral progress in the future. Then, should we be doing more in terms of cultural change? One thing I’ll say is, people are doing quite a lot of it — myself promoting concern for future generations in this book, What We Owe the Future, is doing that. An awful lot of people are going to promote cultural change around attitudes to non-human animals. It is hard to measure, but I think there’s a very big difference between having an optimization mindset — do the best — and having a mindset that’s like, “Therefore, we always need to be able to measure what we’re doing and have some metric that we’re optimizing towards.” That latter thing, I think, is a bit of a straw man against EA. Will the EA movement avoid Conquest’s Second Law, namely that institutions not explicitly designed to be right-wing end up becoming left-wing? It’s happened to all these major foundations: Rockefeller, Ford, Pew. You can go all the way down the list. Whether you like that or not, it seems to be an empirical regularity. Will it happen to EA?…

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