Figuring Good Out—January

For this month’s Figuring Good Out on “origin stories”, we received a solid 6 submissions again.


I wrote about my transition from atheism to pop philosophy & science to LessWrong to EA.

Tom Ash created a taxonomy of EA origin stories by using anecdotes and survey data.

Michelle Hutchinson wrote about how her meeting with Will Macaskill in graduate school led to her joining Giving What We Can.

Bernadette Young argued that the literary character Dorothea Brooke is an alternative example of an EA advocate.

Tom Stocker explained the many different factors that guided him toward EA.

Peter Hurford covered how the connections he made in the EA network influenced major life decisions of his.

February’s topic, as suggested by Ben Kuhn & Ruthie, is “writing about explaining effective altruism.” This isn’t a call for new definitions or explanations of EA—it’s a call for thinking about how to explain EA, especially in person.

As usual, feel free to suggest topics and provide feedback. Have these been useful so far?