I’ve been in the EA movement for a long time and I can attest Rationality did not play any part in the EA movement in the early days.
This is clearly wrong. You can watch talks orreadaboutthe history of the EA community by Toby or Will, and they will be clear that the Rationality community was a core part of the founding of the EA community.
There are parts of the EA community (especially in the UK) that interfaced less, but there was always very substantial entanglement.
The post you linked to from Will MacAskill (“The history of the term ‘effective altruism’” from 2014) doesn’t reference the Rationality community (and the other links you included are to posts or pages that aren’t from Will or Toby, but by Jacy Reese Anthis and some wiki-style pages).
Do you have examples or links to talks or posts on EA history from Toby and Will that do discuss the Rationality community? (I’d be curious to read them. Thanks!)
@RobBensinger had a useful chart depicting how EA was influenced by various communities, including the rationalist community.
I think it is undeniable that the rationality community played a significant part in the development of EA in the early days. I’m surprised to see people denying this.
What seems more debatable is whether this influence is best characterized as “rationalism influenced EA” rather than “both rationalism and EA emerged to a significant degree from an earlier and broader community of people that included a sizeable number of both proto-EAs and proto-rationalists”.
Another podcast linked below with some details about Will and Toby’s early interactions with the Rationality community. Also Holden Karnofsky has an account on LW, and interacted with the Rationality community via e.g. this extensively discussed 2011 post.
Will MacAskill: But then the biggest thing was just looking at what are the options I have available to me in terms of what do I focus my time on? Where one is building up this idea of Giving What We Can, kind of a moral movement focused on helping people and using evidence and data to do that. It just seemed like we were getting a lot of traction there.
Will MacAskill: Alternatively, I did go spend these five-hour seminars at Future of Humanity Institute, that were talking about the impact of superintelligence. Actually, one way in which I was wrong is just the impact of the book that that turned into — namely Superintelligence — was maybe 100 times more impactful than I expected.
Rob Wiblin: Oh, wow.
Will MacAskill:Superintelligence has sold 200,000 copies. If you’d asked me how many copies I expected it to sell, maybe I would have said 1,000 or 2,000. So the impact of it actually was much greater than I was thinking at the time. But honestly, I just think I was right that the tractability of what we were working on at the time was pretty low. And doing this thing of just building a movement of people who really care about some of the problems in the world and who are trying to think carefully about how to make progress there was just much better than being this additional person in the seminar room. I honestly think that intuition was correct. And that was true for Toby as well. Early days of Giving What We Can, he’d be having these arguments with people on LessWrong about whether it was right to focus on global health and development. And his view was, “Well, we’re actually doing something.”
Rob Wiblin: “You guys just comment on this forum.”
Will MacAskill: Yeah. Looking back, actually, again, I will say I’ve been surprised by just how influential some of these ideas have been. And that’s a tremendous testament to early thinkers, like Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky and Carl Shulman. At the same time, I think the insight that we had, which was we’ve actually just got to build stuff — even if perhaps there’s some theoretical arguments that you should be prioritising in a different way — there are many, many, positive indirect effects from just doing something impressive and concrete and tangible, as well as the enormous benefits that we have succeeded in producing, which is tens to hundreds of millions of bed nets distributed and thousands of lives saved.
I’m not sure which, but in one of Will’s 80k podcast interviews he discusses the origins of EA and mentions Yudkowsky and LessWrong as one of three key strands (as well as the GWWC crew in Oxford and Holden/GiveWell).
Robert Wiblin: We’re going to dive into your philosophical views, how you’d like to see effective altruism change, life as an academic, and what you’re researching now. First, how did effective altruism get started in the first place?
Will MacAskill: Effective altruism as a community is really the confluence of 3 different movements. One was Give Well, co-founded by Elie Hassenfeld and Holden Karnofsky. Second was Less Wrong, primarily based in the bay area. The third is the co-founding of Giving What We Can by myself and Toby Ord. Where Giving What We Can was encouraging people to give at least 10% of their income to whatever charities were most effective. Back then we also had a set of recommended charities which were Toby and I’s best guesses about what are the organizations that can have the biggest possible impact with a given amount of money. My path into it was really by being inspired by Peter Singer and finding compelling his arguments that we in rich countries have a duty to give most of our income if we can to those organizations that will do the most good.
There was a talk by Will and Toby about the history of effective altruism. I couldn’t find it quickly when I wrote the above comment, but now found it:
I was involved in the EA movement from around 2014 in Sydney Australia, which I expect is similar to the UK as you mentioned (but all the same, the UK & Australia were and are major centres for the EA movement and our lack of interaction with the Rationalist community in those early days should be noted).
From my recollection, in those early days the local EA Sydney community would co-host events with the local Less Wrong Rationality, Transhumanist, and the Science Party groups just to get the numbers up for events. So yes, the Rationalists did mix with EA, but their contribution was on-par with the Transhumanists.
I don’t recall rationality being a major part of major EA literature at the time (The Most Good You Can Do, The Life You Can Save). Even utilitarianism was downplayed as being fundamental to being an EA. It was later on that Rationality became more influential.
Sorry for sarcasm, but what about returning to the same level of non-involvement and non-interaction between EA and Rationality as you describe was happening in Sydney? I.e. EA events are just co-hosted with LW Rationality and Transhumanism, and the level of Rationality idea non-influence is kept on par with Transhumanism?
So on the object level I think we all agree: ea Sydney was having cohosted events with the rationalists in 2014.
It just seems odd to me to describe this as the influence not being important. But this might be that we simply have a difference about what ‘important influence’ implies.
This is clearly wrong. You can watch talks or read about the history of the EA community by Toby or Will, and they will be clear that the Rationality community was a core part of the founding of the EA community.
There are parts of the EA community (especially in the UK) that interfaced less, but there was always very substantial entanglement.
The post you linked to from Will MacAskill (“The history of the term ‘effective altruism’” from 2014) doesn’t reference the Rationality community (and the other links you included are to posts or pages that aren’t from Will or Toby, but by Jacy Reese Anthis and some wiki-style pages).
Do you have examples or links to talks or posts on EA history from Toby and Will that do discuss the Rationality community? (I’d be curious to read them. Thanks!)
@RobBensinger had a useful chart depicting how EA was influenced by various communities, including the rationalist community.
I think it is undeniable that the rationality community played a significant part in the development of EA in the early days. I’m surprised to see people denying this.
What seems more debatable is whether this influence is best characterized as “rationalism influenced EA” rather than “both rationalism and EA emerged to a significant degree from an earlier and broader community of people that included a sizeable number of both proto-EAs and proto-rationalists”.
Another podcast linked below with some details about Will and Toby’s early interactions with the Rationality community. Also Holden Karnofsky has an account on LW, and interacted with the Rationality community via e.g. this extensively discussed 2011 post.
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-macaskill-what-we-owe-the-future/
Will MacAskill: But then the biggest thing was just looking at what are the options I have available to me in terms of what do I focus my time on? Where one is building up this idea of Giving What We Can, kind of a moral movement focused on helping people and using evidence and data to do that. It just seemed like we were getting a lot of traction there.
Will MacAskill: Alternatively, I did go spend these five-hour seminars at Future of Humanity Institute, that were talking about the impact of superintelligence. Actually, one way in which I was wrong is just the impact of the book that that turned into — namely Superintelligence — was maybe 100 times more impactful than I expected.
Rob Wiblin: Oh, wow.
Will MacAskill: Superintelligence has sold 200,000 copies. If you’d asked me how many copies I expected it to sell, maybe I would have said 1,000 or 2,000. So the impact of it actually was much greater than I was thinking at the time. But honestly, I just think I was right that the tractability of what we were working on at the time was pretty low. And doing this thing of just building a movement of people who really care about some of the problems in the world and who are trying to think carefully about how to make progress there was just much better than being this additional person in the seminar room. I honestly think that intuition was correct. And that was true for Toby as well. Early days of Giving What We Can, he’d be having these arguments with people on LessWrong about whether it was right to focus on global health and development. And his view was, “Well, we’re actually doing something.”
Rob Wiblin: “You guys just comment on this forum.”
Will MacAskill: Yeah. Looking back, actually, again, I will say I’ve been surprised by just how influential some of these ideas have been. And that’s a tremendous testament to early thinkers, like Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky and Carl Shulman. At the same time, I think the insight that we had, which was we’ve actually just got to build stuff — even if perhaps there’s some theoretical arguments that you should be prioritising in a different way — there are many, many, positive indirect effects from just doing something impressive and concrete and tangible, as well as the enormous benefits that we have succeeded in producing, which is tens to hundreds of millions of bed nets distributed and thousands of lives saved.
I’m not sure which, but in one of Will’s 80k podcast interviews he discusses the origins of EA and mentions Yudkowsky and LessWrong as one of three key strands (as well as the GWWC crew in Oxford and Holden/GiveWell).
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-macaskill-moral-philosophy/
Robert Wiblin: We’re going to dive into your philosophical views, how you’d like to see effective altruism change, life as an academic, and what you’re researching now. First, how did effective altruism get started in the first place?
Will MacAskill: Effective altruism as a community is really the confluence of 3 different movements. One was Give Well, co-founded by Elie Hassenfeld and Holden Karnofsky. Second was Less Wrong, primarily based in the bay area. The third is the co-founding of Giving What We Can by myself and Toby Ord. Where Giving What We Can was encouraging people to give at least 10% of their income to whatever charities were most effective. Back then we also had a set of recommended charities which were Toby and I’s best guesses about what are the organizations that can have the biggest possible impact with a given amount of money. My path into it was really by being inspired by Peter Singer and finding compelling his arguments that we in rich countries have a duty to give most of our income if we can to those organizations that will do the most good.
There was a talk by Will and Toby about the history of effective altruism. I couldn’t find it quickly when I wrote the above comment, but now found it:
I was involved in the EA movement from around 2014 in Sydney Australia, which I expect is similar to the UK as you mentioned (but all the same, the UK & Australia were and are major centres for the EA movement and our lack of interaction with the Rationalist community in those early days should be noted).
From my recollection, in those early days the local EA Sydney community would co-host events with the local Less Wrong Rationality, Transhumanist, and the Science Party groups just to get the numbers up for events. So yes, the Rationalists did mix with EA, but their contribution was on-par with the Transhumanists.
I don’t recall rationality being a major part of major EA literature at the time (The Most Good You Can Do, The Life You Can Save). Even utilitarianism was downplayed as being fundamental to being an EA. It was later on that Rationality became more influential.
Sorry for sarcasm, but what about returning to the same level of non-involvement and non-interaction between EA and Rationality as you describe was happening in Sydney? I.e. EA events are just co-hosted with LW Rationality and Transhumanism, and the level of Rationality idea non-influence is kept on par with Transhumanism?
So on the object level I think we all agree: ea Sydney was having cohosted events with the rationalists in 2014.
It just seems odd to me to describe this as the influence not being important. But this might be that we simply have a difference about what ‘important influence’ implies.
I don’t think Sydney has ever been a major centre for the EA movement, and it’s not a very good proxy for the culture/s of major EA hubs.