It took until 2010 or so for effective altruism to become a movement, even though there’s not a lot of distance between EA and Peter Singer’s early writings. I believe that Givewell was a crucial ingredient here.
On my model, people being able to rally around concrete charities wasn’t just a forceful example to use against common objections. Perhaps more importantly, Givewell made doing good tractable enough for young university students so they could achieve easy successes, which probably reinforced the self-image of those aspiring altruists. Absent some tractable ways to do good, people might lose the motivation to devote their careers to EA causes or, more generally, stay passive consumers of discussion material, never becoming personally “activated.”
Absolutely. I’m exactly in that boat—I became convinced of some basic EA principles after reading Singer’s work in 1st year uni last year but I don’t think I would have committed to donating a large chunk of my salary and stuck to it for instance if GWWC didn’t exist. I wouldn’t be here if the community hadn’t made it so tractable. I also was initially skeptical of the longtermist perspective—had EA been presented to me in terms other than the power law distribution of global health charity effectiveness it’s also much less likely I’d be here (I’m now a longtermist :P)
Perhaps related:
It took until 2010 or so for effective altruism to become a movement, even though there’s not a lot of distance between EA and Peter Singer’s early writings. I believe that Givewell was a crucial ingredient here.
On my model, people being able to rally around concrete charities wasn’t just a forceful example to use against common objections. Perhaps more importantly, Givewell made doing good tractable enough for young university students so they could achieve easy successes, which probably reinforced the self-image of those aspiring altruists. Absent some tractable ways to do good, people might lose the motivation to devote their careers to EA causes or, more generally, stay passive consumers of discussion material, never becoming personally “activated.”
Absolutely. I’m exactly in that boat—I became convinced of some basic EA principles after reading Singer’s work in 1st year uni last year but I don’t think I would have committed to donating a large chunk of my salary and stuck to it for instance if GWWC didn’t exist. I wouldn’t be here if the community hadn’t made it so tractable. I also was initially skeptical of the longtermist perspective—had EA been presented to me in terms other than the power law distribution of global health charity effectiveness it’s also much less likely I’d be here (I’m now a longtermist :P)