I thought the reason was that we were looking for a term to replace “super-duper hardcore people”, and settled on “effective altruists”. This predated the facebook group by a considerable time. Indeed, initially I thought the facebook group was a bad idea, as ‘EA’ was not intended to be public facing at all.
The term ‘effective altruism’ was created before the FB group, but I think Evan is referring to the fact that the FB group uses the ‘ist’ form rather than the ‘ism’ form and is the most prominent thing to do so. I think it would have been an improvement if it had used the ‘ism’ form (and it is not a co-incidence that this forum does).
I thought the reason was that we were looking for a term to replace “super-duper hardcore people”, and settled on “effective altruists”. This predated the facebook group by a considerable time. Indeed, initially I thought the facebook group was a bad idea, as ‘EA’ was not intended to be public facing at all.
The term ‘effective altruism’ was created before the FB group, but I think Evan is referring to the fact that the FB group uses the ‘ist’ form rather than the ‘ism’ form and is the most prominent thing to do so. I think it would have been an improvement if it had used the ‘ism’ form (and it is not a co-incidence that this forum does).
I’m pretty confident Will used the ‘ist’ form in conversation with me.