207 | William MacAskill on Maximizing Good in the Present and Future

207 | William MacAskill on Maximizing Good in the Present and Future

It's always a little humbling to think about what affects your words and actions might have on other people, not only right now but potentially well into the future. Now take that humble feeling and promote it to all of humanity, and arbitrarily far in time. How do our actions as a society affect all the potential generations to come? William MacAskill is best known as a founder of the Effective Altruism movement, and is now the author of What We Owe the Future. In this new book he makes the case for longtermism: the idea that we should put substantial effort into positively influencing the long-term future. We talk about the pros and cons of that view, including the underlying philosophical presuppositions.

Mindscape listeners can get 50% off What We Owe the Future, thanks to a partnership between the Forethought Foundation and Bookshop.org. Just click here and use code MINDSCAPE50 at checkout.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

William (Will) MacAskill received his D.Phil. in philosophy from the University of Oxford. He is currently an associate professor of philosophy at Oxford, as well as a research fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, director of the Forefront Foundation for Global Priorities Research, President of the Centre for Effective Altruism, and co-founder of 80,000 hours and Giving What We Can.


Jaksot(416)

Holiday Message 2019: On Publishing Books

Holiday Message 2019: On Publishing Books

Welcome to the second annual Mindscape Holiday Message! No substantive content or deep ideas, just me talking a bit about the state of the podcast and what's on my mind. Since the big event for me in ...

22 Joulu 20191h 6min

77 | Azra Raza on The Way We Should Fight Cancer

77 | Azra Raza on The Way We Should Fight Cancer

In the United States, more than one in five deaths is caused by cancer. The medical community has put enormous resources into fighting this disease, yet its causes and best treatments continue to be a...

16 Joulu 20191h 22min

76 | Ned Hall on Possible Worlds and the Laws of Nature

76 | Ned Hall on Possible Worlds and the Laws of Nature

It's too easy to take laws of nature for granted. Sure, gravity is pulling us toward Earth today; but how do we know it won't be pushing us away tomorrow? We extrapolate from past experience to future...

9 Joulu 20191h 25min

75 | Max Tegmark on Reality, Simulation, and the Multiverse

75 | Max Tegmark on Reality, Simulation, and the Multiverse

We've talked a lot recently about the Many Worlds of quantum mechanics. That's one kind of multiverse that physicists often contemplate. There is also the cosmological multiverse, which we talked abou...

2 Joulu 20191h 11min

74 | Stephen Greenblatt on Stories, History, and Cultural Poetics

74 | Stephen Greenblatt on Stories, History, and Cultural Poetics

An infinite number of things happen; we bring structure and meaning to the world by making art and telling stories about it. Every work of literature created by human beings comes out of an historical...

25 Marras 20191h 6min

73 | Grimes (c) on Music, Creativity, and Digital Personae

73 | Grimes (c) on Music, Creativity, and Digital Personae

Changing technologies have always affected how we produce and enjoy art, and music might be the most obvious example. Radio and recordings made it easy for professional music to be widely disseminated...

18 Marras 20191h 18min

72 | César Hidalgo on Information in Societies, Economies, and the Universe

72 | César Hidalgo on Information in Societies, Economies, and the Universe

Maxwell's Demon is a famous thought experiment in which a mischievous imp uses knowledge of the velocities of gas molecules in a box to decrease the entropy of the gas, which could then be used to do ...

11 Marras 20191h 16min

71 | Philip Goff on Consciousness Everywhere

71 | Philip Goff on Consciousness Everywhere

The human brain contains roughly 85 billion neurons, wired together in an extraordinarily complex network of interconnected parts. It's hardly surprising that we don't understand the mind and how it w...

4 Marras 20191h 34min

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