How to Improve the World for the Generations to Come with Will MacAskill

In his major new book What We Owe The Future: A Million-Year View, Will MacAskill argues that we need to care about people thousands and even millions of years in the future. On September 1 he came to Intelligence Squared to argue that influencing the very long term is the most urgent moral priority of our times – because the fate of future generations depends on the decisions that we make in our lifetimes.

In conversation with Will MacAskill is Max Roser, Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development and founder and editor of Our World in Data.

[mohamedali]

Justice is the basis of governance and prosperity.

[orgonebubbletechcuresyou]

Improved parenting and making children less of a bully and more of a self respecting person of kindness is super important. Even making sure the child in the womb is nurtured better is a great idea. Then children also need to be educated in school about how to have good qualities and learn the pitfalls in life instead of useless crap like history and square dancing etc!

[cambridgeanalytico]

Sustainability; there are millions of species humans currently endanger and preventing their permanent loss should be something we can all support.

[chasefreely]

Decentralize and limit government all the way down to the local level. Revert back to the gold standard, and repeal the income tax. Create a flat tax system on all goods as a means to generate government revenue. Last, term limits and a requirement that anyone running for a political position must have lived in the area they will preside over for no less than ten years.

[WAWSB]

My opinion about life is, we are just here to entertain ourselves till the day we die. Do good to others and be kind to nature. many people including myself chase Bank accounts. what will the world look like if we abolish money or at least interest on money. we have become slaves to the system and we are damaging the environment chasing our own tails. We can learn heaps from Alan Savory on holistic management. I will post a link to a very good seminar he gave which I think you will find insightful.

[nxgrs]

Official global warming is +1.0 to 1.5 C in the GMST anomaly (Know what that is?) over 140 to 170 years depending on the "expert" and database. 15 C to 16 C is a scary increase of 6.7%.

But “C” does not have thermodynamic substance, “K” does.

Properly cited as 288 K to 289 K, + 0.34%, this difficult to measure change is too trivial to be some kind of dangerous trend.

The current GMST trend is 0.013 C PER YEAR!!! (UAH data) Insignificant! And impossible to actually measure. How is that a “heat wave?”

It's noise in the data, UHI, instrument uncertainty and drift, minor albedo
80% of the surface did/does not even have credible weather data. (Heller)

Some summer engineering interns loaded gobs of garbage data into the computer's maw, spun the algorithm wheel and hurled out a statistical hallucination.

[googlepigs]

Then you're not capitalist, then. Thats
good, because it's clearly the mindless selfish greed and avarice of capitalism
that is destroying the future.