Thread by Matt Burgess

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As one of the experts who was consulted on @willmacaskill's What We Owe the Future (but did not respond to @xriskology's request), I feel a duty to respond to this, as parts of this piece are misleading in ways that make me suspect this tweet might be misleading too. THREAD 1/

First, to the charge that we weren't told what we were reviewing: I can't speak for the other experts consulted (which includes many highly regarded scientists like @hausfath), but it was very clear to me that I was being asked to review a chapter of What We Owe the Future. 2/
When asked to review a popular book as part of the fact-checking process, I see it as my job to comment on the scientific merits of specific parts that fall into my area of expertise, and not editorialize on the authors' normative conclusions, etc. 3/
In my case, the specific issue I was asked to comment on was the scenarios and the current thinking in the field re: most plausible emissions pathways. I think the @willmacaskill did a good job representing the state of the field on this in the limited space & for the audience.4/
That said, the general impression I got from reading the chapter (& later the rest of the book) was that @willmacaskill thinks climate change is a serious challenge, and making progress on the energy transition is unambiguously a good thing for society to prioritize. I agree. 5/
Since part of the book deals with speculating on what are the greatest threats of extinction-level catastrophes for humanity, MacAskill speculates that climate change is significantly less likely to cause human extinction than other things like nuclear war or AI takeover. 6/
Again, I agree, at least re: nuclear war. I don't know enough about AI to comment intelligently. Even if I disagreed though, I wouldn't see it as my job as a reviewer to push back unless the deep uncertainty wasn't clearly expressed, and IMO, it was. 7/
But this is where the quote @xriskology highlights comes from. @willmacaskill speculates whether "the low-probability but worst-case climate scenario, in which we ultimately burn through all recoverable fossil fuels" would cause enough climate change to make humans extinct. 8/
To be clear, MacAskill's claim that this is an extremely low-probability emissions scenario is very uncontroversial. So, him speculating on whether this scenario would wipe out civilization doesn't really bear much on whether he thinks climate change is a problem. 9/
But, as part of this speculation, MacAskill asks whether it would become physically impossible to grow crops anywhere on Earth in this scenario, and speculates that it would not, citing a 2015 study by King et al on crops' lethal limits. 10/
Whether @willmacaskill has correctly interpreted the agronomy literature here is beyond my expertise, but I find the way @xriskology presents this quote out of context--to implicitly suggest that MacAskill doesn't think climate change is a big deal--to be misleading. 11/
Someone saying that they think there is a low probability of climate change causing total civilizational collapse or human extinction is *very* different from someone saying they don't think climate change is a big deal. 12/
For an analogy, take COVID: COVID is horrific and has caused millions of deaths. It is one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent history. Everyone agrees that society should do whatever is necessary to prevent it from happening again. 13/
Yet, it's also true that COVID did not come close to collapsing global civilization. If someone acknowledges this fact, are they being too cavalier about COVID? Do they not care about it? By the logic of the piece, the implied answer seems to be yes. 14/
This brings me to why I chose not to respond to the request for comment for this piece. This was the request. It seemed odd to me that the focus of the request was on this one (in the context of the book, minor) quote, and not on the whole book. It smelled like a 'gotcha'. 15/
And so, I Googled and saw that much of Torres's popular writing over the past year has been opinion pieces critical of @willmacaskill and longtermism. That's fine; disagreeing with MacAskill is their prerogative, and I think some of their critiques are thoughtful. 16/
But, I also think it doesn't make them a good candidate to do objective journalism on @willmacaskill's work. And so, I ignored the request, rather than participating in what I suspected might not be a good-faith investigation of the book and the ways we were consulted for it. 17/
My impression from reading the piece is that my instinct here was probably right. But, now that it's out, I feel a responsibility to correct the record regarding how @willmacaskill consulted me (and I suspect also my colleagues). 18/
As for What We Owe the Future, I encourage people to read the book and make up their own minds about it. My general take is the following: 19/
Much of the book focuses on important uncontroversial premises, and then, like any good academic philosopher, @willmacaskill tries to push his ideas to their logical extremes and in doing so, gets into admittedly speculative and critique-able territory. 20/
But, unless you're an academic philosopher, I encourage you to focus on the basic and important points of the book, which FWIW I agree with:
1) We don't think enough about long-term future and how much it could be shaped by major consequences of decisions we make now. 21/
2/ Major threats that deserve our attention include things already on our radar, like climate change, nuclear war, and pandemics (and @willmacaskill was sounding alarms on pandemics before COVID), as well as some things that are not, like AI and stagnation. 22/
I can't comment on AI, but I agree that stagnation is an under-appreciated threat, as I've written about: www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01229-y 23/
3) Given deep uncertainties, three good things to focus on are: learning, building options, and doing things which are unambiguously good (like cutting CO2 emissions, which incidentally is one of the examples @willmacaskill uses). 24/
Beyond that, I encourage people who are not academic philosophers to take the stuff about colonizing space, how do you weigh quantity & quality of long-term future lives, etc as what it is: an academic philosopher philosophizing. 25/
END of thread. 26/26
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