Understanding The Morality of the Elite Technocrat

Malcolm & Simone Collins dive deep into the worldview of Amanda Askell (philosopher & Anthropic's personality alignment lead, formerly Amanda MacAskill), former wife of effective altruism leader William MacAskill.

They unpack her 2015 Quartz piece arguing that killing predators like Cecil the Lion might ethically reduce wild animal suffering — and the logical extensions: euthanizing prey, sterilizing wildlife, negative utilitarianism vibes, and dystopian "Hunger Games for animals" with AI-managed nature.

From prey/predator identification psychology (victim vs. hunter lens), to name changes in marriage, fertility views, polyamory skepticism, anti-"born this way" LGBT arguments, AI safety blind spots, and why elite leftist intellectuals often ask rhetorical questions but stop short of pragmatic follow-ups.

Why do these hyper-rational EA circles seem insulated? How does this mindset connect to declining fertility, techno-utopianism, and the future of AI ethics? Plus: why pragmatic "hard" effective altruism beats signaling-based benevolence — and why cultures that don't reproduce simply die out.

If you're interested in EA critiques, wild animal welfare debates, pronatalism, AI alignment quirks, or why identifying with prey vs. predator reveals deep worldview differences — this episode is for you.

BTW, if you want to learn more about Hard Effective Altruism, check out HardEA.org.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Which is we accept that prey animals may indeed have miserable lives, and that if they do, his death condemns his potential prey to potentially many more years of suffering than had he killed them. Okay. But the claim that prey animals have miserable lives leads animal activists to a surprising conclusion of a different sort.

What is it? Ooh.

Think

Simone Collins: I

Malcolm Collins: then we have to kill the prey animals as well.

Simone Collins: Oh God, of course. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: Why should the man not take the woman’s name , and he just asks a question, why, why, why is it bad?

Why is it bad? But he doesn’t even think to investigate that. This is what’s so interesting about this elitist leftist perspective. They, for phrase it tonally as if it’s a rhetorical question and then they don’t engage with it.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be discussing.

The mindset and trying to dig into the world perspective of the leftist intellectual elite.

Simone Collins: Oh, no.

Malcolm Collins: And specifically leftist intellectual elite [00:01:00] women. And we are going to do this through I mean originally this was called to me as an idea because you sent me a WhatsApp about a tweet that you wrote, HP Lovecraft had me about a Amanda McCaskill who, well, she was called Amanda McCaskill when the piece was written.

She’s no longer called Amanda McCaskill, which is kind of hilarious because her husband changed his last name to her maternal grandmother’s last name, which was McCaskill. That’s Will McCaskill. By the way, if you don’t know him, incredibly like one of the leading two or three leading figures of the effect of altruist movement.

Simone Collins: He wrote What We Owe The Future, which had one of the most successful press debuts of a book. In forever

Malcolm Collins: in human history. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So it’s insane.

Malcolm Collins: But when she broke up with him, he kept the last name that she made him take and she changed it again. That’s why she has a different name now

Simone Collins: and, and they chose the, yeah.

That’s interesting. So this is my first time hearing of a couple choosing. [00:02:00] A totally new last name rather than a hyphen. Aside from the Edens,

Malcolm Collins: it wasn’t a new last name. It was her maternal grandmother’s last name, basically. But

Simone Collins: she didn’t grow up with that last name.

Malcolm Collins: That’s

Simone Collins: the thing,

Malcolm Collins: basically what she did.

So if you’re a woman and somebody’s like, Hey. Take my last name.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The, then the woman says this to the husband, and the husband’s just gonna say, but that’s just your, your granddad’s last name, right? Like, yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. It’s just another man. Like

Malcolm Collins: she did it, she traced it through the maternal line.

She didn’t choose a random

Simone Collins: left. It’s like the, the most leftist choice you can

Malcolm Collins: make. But before I go into this piece, it’s important to understand that this isn’t just the former wife of Will McCaskill. She also runs the ethics for philanthropic.

So she is in charge of putting together the Constitution for philanthropic ethics. This is the company that runs the Claude Model, one of the largest AI companies in the world. Yeah. And one of the ones that invests the most money in its ethics bridge.

Simone Collins: To be fair, yeah. We know some people doing [00:03:00] non-ST stupid AI ethics work and.

The team that has been the most responsive to them has been Claude’s team.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, do you guys remember when we read that story about the AI that would kill the CEO and the company admitted that even the own AI would do it About 80% of the time. That was her ethics team. Oh, that put out that study,

Simone Collins: the kill bot?

Yes. Wonderful.

Malcolm Collins: So anyway and I’m, I’m pointing all this out. As we go into this, ‘cause you’ll understand that some of her ideas are just bizarre, and then others seem really intelligent. And that’s why it’s important to try to peel out the logic behind everything to better understand this world perspective.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So she wrote a piece to truly into animal suffering. The most ethical choice is to kill wild predators, especially Cecil the Lion. And this was written in response to the killing of Cecil the lion, you know, the celebrity lion that guy killed. And just to start here, we’ll go over the a full chunk of this in a bit.

Okay. But by killing predators, we can save the lives of many prey animals like wildebeest, zebras, and [00:04:00] buffaloes in the local area that would otherwise be killed in order to keep animals at the top of the food chain alive. Mm-hmm. And there’s no reason to consider the lives of predators like a lions to be any more important than the lives of prey.

And ironically, the EA community talking to Normies.

Speaker 6: That was the easiest way to stop him. I didn’t want to kill the spider. I wanted to save them both. What are you talking about? Unless the spider caught the butterfly, it would die of starvation anyway.

I’m not wrong about this, Rem yes, but Wanting to save both is just a naive contradiction.

Speaker 5: What’s

Speaker 6: wrong with

Speaker 7: you, Knives?! don’t you understand?! I wanted to save both of them, you idiot!

Speaker 6: Don’t make any sense, Bash.

Malcolm Collins: Hmm. Now you saw this and apparently you just thought it was funny that you