1. William David MacAskill is a Scottish philosopher and author, as well as one of the originators of the effective altruism movement.
18 Facts About William MacAskill
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William MacAskill was a Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford, co-founded Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours, and is the author of Doing Good Better and What We Owe the Future, and the co-author of Moral Uncertainty.
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At the age of 18, MacAskill read Peter Singer's 1972 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", which motivated his philosophical and charitable interests.
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William MacAskill earned his BA in philosophy at Jesus College, Cambridge in 2008 and BPhil at St Edmund Hall, Oxford in 2010.
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William MacAskill went on to be awarded a DPhil at St Anne's College, Oxford in 2014, supervised by John Broome and Krister Bykvist.
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William MacAskill then took up a junior research fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, before being elected to an associate professorship at the University of Oxford in association with a Fellowship at Lincoln College, Oxford, which he left after one year.
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William MacAskill co-founded the Centre for Effective Altruism in 2011 as an umbrella organisation of Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours, which he co-founded with Benjamin Todd, to provide advice on how to use one's career to do the most good in the world.
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In 2018, William MacAskill gave a TED talk on effective altruism at the TED conference in Vancouver.
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William MacAskill has worked as chair of the advisory board at the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford and Director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research.
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William MacAskill was associated with Sam Bankman-Fried for a number of years and reportedly dismissed claims that Bankman-Fried was engaging in inappropriate conduct as a "he said-she said" during an effort in 2018 to oust Bankman-Fried from control of the now-failed trading firm Alameda Research.
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William MacAskill was a member of the FTX Future Fund, which granted $160 million to effective altruism causes in 2022, including $33 million to organizations directly connected to MacAskill.
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In 2022, as tech magnate Elon Musk sought funding for his purchase of Twitter, William MacAskill liaised between Musk and Bankman-Fried.
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Musk and William MacAskill were previously acquainted; Musk described What We Owe the Future as "a close match for my philosophy".
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William MacAskill contacted Musk to arrange a conversation with Bankman-Fried, describing him as "my collaborator".
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One of the main focuses of William MacAskill's research has been how one ought to make decisions under normative uncertainty; this was the topic of his DPhil thesis, as well as articles in Ethics, Mind and The Journal of Philosophy.
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William MacAskill argues that many of the ways people think about doing good achieve very little, but that by applying data and scientific reasoning to doing good, people can have a much larger positive impact.
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However, in the same year the book was published, William MacAskill deemphasised earning to give, saying "only a small proportion of people should earn to give long term".
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William MacAskill concludes that the future will likely be positive on balance if humanity survives.