William David MacAskill is a Scottish philosopher and author, as well as one of the originators of the effective altruism movement.
19 Facts About William MacAskill
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William MacAskill is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Research Fellow 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 co-founded Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours, and he is the author of the 2015 book Doing Good Better, the 2022 book What We Owe the Future and co-author of the 2020 book 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 taking an associate professorship at Lincoln College, Oxford.
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Elon Musk 8.
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 your 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 Samuel Bankman-Fried for a number of years and supported Bankman-Fried against an effort in 2018 to oust him from control of the now-failed trading firm Alameda Research despite being made aware of claims that Bankman-Fried was engaging in inappropriate conduct.
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William MacAskill benefited from his association with FTX and he was a member of Samuel Bankman-Fried's 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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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 the doing good, one 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.
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In 2022, as tech magnate Elon Musk sought funding for his purchase of Twitter, William MacAskill liaisoned 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".