My feeling is that it was a bit that people who wanted to attack global poverty efficiently decided to call themselves effective altruists, and then a bunch of Less Wrongers came over and convinced (a lot of) them that ‘hey, going extinct is an even biggler deal’, but the name still stuck, because names are sticky things.
My feeling is that it was a bit that people who wanted to attack global poverty efficiently decided to call themselves effective altruists, and then a bunch of Less Wrongers came over and convinced (a lot of) them that ‘hey, going extinct is an even biggler deal’, but the name still stuck, because names are sticky things.