Why didn’t Will MacAskill predict Sam Bankman-Fried’s malfeasance?
I thought this was a great, as well as hilarious, critique from Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever, loc 398:
And MacAskill’s ability to forecast the future—even in the short term—is seriously questionable. Given far more information than most, he still didn’t accurately predict what would happen with Sam, just a few months after What We Owe the Future was published.
Effective Altruism founder Will MacAskill has built a hugely influential philosophical movement on the moral application of our knowledge about the world. In its more recent Longtermist variant this rests on weighing knowledge, even if fuzzy, about the long term trajectory of human civilisation against present concerns.
Yet Will MacAskill was old friends with billionaire crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), who he was repeatedly warned about and who supported his organisations with tens of billions of dollars. If he couldn’t act morally in relation to the substantial weight of evidence about SBF’s malfeasance then why should anyone have confidence in his capacity to act morally in relation to the deeply speculative knowledge of the future he assigns great importance to?
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