Summary: The piece could give the reader the impression that Jacy, Felicifia and THINK played a comparably important role to the Oxford community, Will, and Toby, which is not the case.
I’ll follow the chronological structure of Jacy’s post, focusing first on 2008-2012, then 2012-2021. Finally, I’ll discuss “founders” of EA, and sum up.
2008-2012
Jacy says that EA started as the confluence of four proto-communities: 1) SingInst/rationality, 2) Givewell/OpenPhil, 3) Felicifia, and 4) GWWC/80k (or the broader Oxford community). He also gives honorable mentions to randomistas and other Peter Singer fans. Great—so far I agree.
What is important to note, however, is the contributions that these various groups made. For the first decade of EA, most key community institutions of EA came from (4) - the Oxford community, including GWWC, 80k, and CEA, and secondly from (2), although Givewell seems to me to have been more of a grantmaking entity than a community hub. Although the rationality community provided many key ideas and introduced many key individuals to EA, the institutions that it ran, such as CFAR, were mostly oriented toward its own “rationality” community.
Finally, Felicifia is discussed at greatest length in the piece, and Jacy clearly has a special affinity to it, based on his history there, as do I. He goes as far as to describe the 2008-12 period as a history of “Felicifia and other proto-EA communities”. Although I would love to take credit for the development of EA in this period, I consider Felicifia to have had the third- or fourth-largest role in “founding EA” of groups on this list. I understand its role as roughly analogous to the one currently played (in 2022) by the EA Forum, as compared to those of CEA and OpenPhil: it provides a loose social scaffolding that extends to parts of the world that lack any other EA organisation. It therefore provides some interesting ideas and leads to the discovery of some interesting people, but it is not where most of the work gets done.
Jacy largely discusses the Felicifia Forum as a key component, rather than the Felicifia group-blog. However, once again, this is not quite what I would focus on. I agree that the Forum contributed a useful social-networking function to EA. However, I suspect we will find that more of the important ideas originated on Seth Baum’s Felicifia group-blog and more of the big contributors started there. Overall, I think the emphasis on the blog should be at least as great as that of the forum.
2012 onwards
Jacy describes how he co-founded THINK in 2012 as the first student network explicitly focused on this emergent community. What he neglects to discuss at this time is that the GWWC and 80k Hours student networks already existed, focusing on effective giving and impactful careers. He also mentions that a forum post dated to 2014 discussed the naming of CEA but fails to note that the events described in the post occurred in 2011, culminating in the name “effective altruism” being selected for that community in December 2011. So steps had already been taken toward having an “EA” moniker and an EA organisation before THINK began.
Co-founders of EA
To wrap things up, let’s get to the question of how this history connects to the “co-founding” of EA.
Some people including me have described themselves as “co-founders” of EA. I hesitate to use this term for anyone because this has been a diverse, diffuse convergence of many communities. However, I think insofar as anyone does speak of founders or founding members, it should be acknowledged that dozens of people worked full-time on EA community-building and research since before 2012, and very few ideas in EA have been the responsibility of one or even a small number of thinkers. We should be consistent in the recognition of these contributions.
There may have been more, but only three people come to mind, who have described themselves as co-founders of EA: Will, Toby, and Jacy. For Will and Toby, this makes absolute sense: they were the main ringleaders of the main group (the Oxford community) that started EA, and they founded the main institutions there. The basis for considering Jacy among the founders, however, is that he was around in the early days (as were a couple of hundred others), and that he started one of the three main student groups—the latest, and least-important among them. In my view, it’s not a reasonable claim to have made.
Having said that, I agree that it is good to emphasise that as the “founders” of EA, Will and Toby only did a minority—perhaps 20% - of the actual work involved in founding it. Moreover, I think there is a related, interesting question: if Will and Toby had not founded EA, would it have happened otherwise? The groundswell of interest that Jacy describes suggests to me an affirmative answer: a large group of people were already becoming increasingly interested in areas relating to applied utilitarianism, and increasingly connected with one another, via GiveWell, academic utilitarian research, Felicifia, utilitarian Facebook groups, and other mechanisms. I lean toward thinking that something like an EA movement would have happened one way or another, although it’s characteristics might have been different.
Thanks for this, and for your work on Felicifia. As someone who’s found it crucial to have others around me setting an example for me, I particularly admire the people who basically just figured out for themselves what they should be doing and then starting doing it.
Fwiw re THINK: I might be wrong in this recollection, but at the time it felt like very clearly Mark Lee’s organisation (though Jacy did help him out). It also was basically only around for a year. The model was ‘try to go really broad by contacting tonnes of schools in one go and getting hype going’. It was a cool idea which had precedent, but my impression was the experiment basically didn’t pan out.
Regarding THINK, I personally also got the impression that Mark was a sole-founder, albeit one who managed other staff. I had just taken Jacy’s claim of co-founding THINK at face value. If his claim was inaccurate, then clearly Jacy’s piece was more misleading than I had realised.
I agree with the impression that Mark Lee seemed the sole founder. I was helping Mark Lee with some minor contributions at THINK in 2013, and Jacy didn’t occur to me as one of the main contributors at the time. (Perhaps he was more involved with a specific THINK group, but not the overall organization?)
[Edit: I’ve now made some small additions to the post to better ensure readers do not get the impressions that you’re worried about. The substantive content of the post remains the same, and I have not read any disagreements with it, though please let me know if there are any.]
I think I agree with essentially all of this, though I would have preferred if you gave this feedback when you were reading the draft because I would have worded my comments to ensure they don’t give the impression you’re worried about. I strongly agree with your guess that EA would probably have come to exist without Will and Toby, and I would extend that to a guess for any small group. Of course such guesses are very speculative.
I would also emphasize my agreement with the claim that the Oxford community played a large role than Felicifia or THINK, but I think EA’s origins were broader and more diverse than most people think. My guess for Will and Toby’s % of the hours put into “founding” it would be much lower than your 20%.
On the co-founder term, I think of founders as much broader than the founders of, say, a company. EA has been the result of many people’s efforts, many of whom I think are ignored or diminished in some tellings of EA history. That being said, I want to emphasize that I think this was only on my website for a few weeks at most, and I removed it shortly after I first received negative feedback on it. I believe I also casually used the term elsewhere, and it was sometimes used by people in my bio description when introducing me as a speaker. Again, I haven’t used it since 2019.
I emphasize Felicifia in my comments because that is where I have the most first- hand experience to contribute, its history hasn’t been as publicized as others, and I worry that many (most?) people hearing these histories think the history of EA was more centralized in Oxford than it was, in my opinion.
I’m glad you shared this information, and I will try to improve and clarify the post asap.
I think I agree with essentially all of this, though I would have preferred if you gave this feedback when you were reading the draft because I would have worded my comments to ensure they don’t give the impression you’re worried about.
If it seemed to you like I was raising different issues in the draft, then each to their own, I guess. But these concerns were what I had in mind when I wrote comments like the following:
> 2004–2008: Before I found other EAs
If you’re starting with this, then you should probably include “my” in the title (or similar) because it’s about your experience with EA, rather than just an impartial historical recount… you allocate about 1⁄3 of the word count to autobiographical content that is only loosely related to the early history of EA...
> In general, EA emerged as the convergence from 2008 to 2012 at least 4 distinct but overlapping communities
I think the “EA” name largely emerged from (4), and it’s core institutions mostly from (4) with a bit of (2). You’d be on more solid ground if you said that the EA community—the major contributors—emerged from (1-4), or if you at least clarified this somehow.
> dozens of people worked full-time on EA community-building and research since before 2012
This perhaps conflates “EA” community building with proto-EA community-building. There was plenty of the latter, but not much/any of the former.
> 2012 onward: Growing EA as EA
again, I think you should be more explicit in both the title and intro that you’re just telling the story of your trajectory through the early history, rather than detailing how everything came to be. Because you’re largely concentrating on the bits you were involved in.
[Edit: I’ve now made some small additions to the post to better ensure readers do not get the impressions that you’re worried about. The substantive content of the post remains the same, and I have not read any disagreements with it, though please let me know if there are any.]
Thanks for clarifying. I see the connection between both sets of comments, but the draft comments still seem more like ‘it might be confusing whether this is about your experience in EA or an even-coverage history’, while the new comments seem more like ‘it might give the impression that Felicifia utilitarians and LessWrong rationalists had a bigger role, that GWWC and 80k didn’t have student groups, that EA wasn’t selected as a name for CEA in 2011, and that you had as much influence in building EA as a as Will or Toby.’ These seem meaningfully different, and while I adjusted for the former, I didn’t adjust for the latter.
(Again, I will add some qualification as soon as I can, e.g., noting that there were other student groups, which I’m happy to note but just didn’t because that is well-documented and not where I was personally most involved.)
Comments on Jacy Reese Anthis’ Some Early History of EA (archived version).
Summary: The piece could give the reader the impression that Jacy, Felicifia and THINK played a comparably important role to the Oxford community, Will, and Toby, which is not the case.
I’ll follow the chronological structure of Jacy’s post, focusing first on 2008-2012, then 2012-2021. Finally, I’ll discuss “founders” of EA, and sum up.
2008-2012
Jacy says that EA started as the confluence of four proto-communities: 1) SingInst/rationality, 2) Givewell/OpenPhil, 3) Felicifia, and 4) GWWC/80k (or the broader Oxford community). He also gives honorable mentions to randomistas and other Peter Singer fans. Great—so far I agree.
What is important to note, however, is the contributions that these various groups made. For the first decade of EA, most key community institutions of EA came from (4) - the Oxford community, including GWWC, 80k, and CEA, and secondly from (2), although Givewell seems to me to have been more of a grantmaking entity than a community hub. Although the rationality community provided many key ideas and introduced many key individuals to EA, the institutions that it ran, such as CFAR, were mostly oriented toward its own “rationality” community.
Finally, Felicifia is discussed at greatest length in the piece, and Jacy clearly has a special affinity to it, based on his history there, as do I. He goes as far as to describe the 2008-12 period as a history of “Felicifia and other proto-EA communities”. Although I would love to take credit for the development of EA in this period, I consider Felicifia to have had the third- or fourth-largest role in “founding EA” of groups on this list. I understand its role as roughly analogous to the one currently played (in 2022) by the EA Forum, as compared to those of CEA and OpenPhil: it provides a loose social scaffolding that extends to parts of the world that lack any other EA organisation. It therefore provides some interesting ideas and leads to the discovery of some interesting people, but it is not where most of the work gets done.
Jacy largely discusses the Felicifia Forum as a key component, rather than the Felicifia group-blog. However, once again, this is not quite what I would focus on. I agree that the Forum contributed a useful social-networking function to EA. However, I suspect we will find that more of the important ideas originated on Seth Baum’s Felicifia group-blog and more of the big contributors started there. Overall, I think the emphasis on the blog should be at least as great as that of the forum.
2012 onwards
Jacy describes how he co-founded THINK in 2012 as the first student network explicitly focused on this emergent community. What he neglects to discuss at this time is that the GWWC and 80k Hours student networks already existed, focusing on effective giving and impactful careers. He also mentions that a forum post dated to 2014 discussed the naming of CEA but fails to note that the events described in the post occurred in 2011, culminating in the name “effective altruism” being selected for that community in December 2011. So steps had already been taken toward having an “EA” moniker and an EA organisation before THINK began.
Co-founders of EA
To wrap things up, let’s get to the question of how this history connects to the “co-founding” of EA.
There may have been more, but only three people come to mind, who have described themselves as co-founders of EA: Will, Toby, and Jacy. For Will and Toby, this makes absolute sense: they were the main ringleaders of the main group (the Oxford community) that started EA, and they founded the main institutions there. The basis for considering Jacy among the founders, however, is that he was around in the early days (as were a couple of hundred others), and that he started one of the three main student groups—the latest, and least-important among them. In my view, it’s not a reasonable claim to have made.
Having said that, I agree that it is good to emphasise that as the “founders” of EA, Will and Toby only did a minority—perhaps 20% - of the actual work involved in founding it. Moreover, I think there is a related, interesting question: if Will and Toby had not founded EA, would it have happened otherwise? The groundswell of interest that Jacy describes suggests to me an affirmative answer: a large group of people were already becoming increasingly interested in areas relating to applied utilitarianism, and increasingly connected with one another, via GiveWell, academic utilitarian research, Felicifia, utilitarian Facebook groups, and other mechanisms. I lean toward thinking that something like an EA movement would have happened one way or another, although it’s characteristics might have been different.
Thanks for this, and for your work on Felicifia. As someone who’s found it crucial to have others around me setting an example for me, I particularly admire the people who basically just figured out for themselves what they should be doing and then starting doing it.
Fwiw re THINK: I might be wrong in this recollection, but at the time it felt like very clearly Mark Lee’s organisation (though Jacy did help him out). It also was basically only around for a year. The model was ‘try to go really broad by contacting tonnes of schools in one go and getting hype going’. It was a cool idea which had precedent, but my impression was the experiment basically didn’t pan out.
That’s very nice of you to say, thanks Michelle!
Regarding THINK, I personally also got the impression that Mark was a sole-founder, albeit one who managed other staff. I had just taken Jacy’s claim of co-founding THINK at face value. If his claim was inaccurate, then clearly Jacy’s piece was more misleading than I had realised.
I agree with the impression that Mark Lee seemed the sole founder. I was helping Mark Lee with some minor contributions at THINK in 2013, and Jacy didn’t occur to me as one of the main contributors at the time. (Perhaps he was more involved with a specific THINK group, but not the overall organization?)
[Edit: I’ve now made some small additions to the post to better ensure readers do not get the impressions that you’re worried about. The substantive content of the post remains the same, and I have not read any disagreements with it, though please let me know if there are any.]
I think I agree with essentially all of this, though I would have preferred if you gave this feedback when you were reading the draft because I would have worded my comments to ensure they don’t give the impression you’re worried about. I strongly agree with your guess that EA would probably have come to exist without Will and Toby, and I would extend that to a guess for any small group. Of course such guesses are very speculative.
I would also emphasize my agreement with the claim that the Oxford community played a large role than Felicifia or THINK, but I think EA’s origins were broader and more diverse than most people think. My guess for Will and Toby’s % of the hours put into “founding” it would be much lower than your 20%.
On the co-founder term, I think of founders as much broader than the founders of, say, a company. EA has been the result of many people’s efforts, many of whom I think are ignored or diminished in some tellings of EA history. That being said, I want to emphasize that I think this was only on my website for a few weeks at most, and I removed it shortly after I first received negative feedback on it. I believe I also casually used the term elsewhere, and it was sometimes used by people in my bio description when introducing me as a speaker. Again, I haven’t used it since 2019.
I emphasize Felicifia in my comments because that is where I have the most first- hand experience to contribute, its history hasn’t been as publicized as others, and I worry that many (most?) people hearing these histories think the history of EA was more centralized in Oxford than it was, in my opinion.
I’m glad you shared this information, and I will try to improve and clarify the post asap.
If it seemed to you like I was raising different issues in the draft, then each to their own, I guess. But these concerns were what I had in mind when I wrote comments like the following:
[Edit: I’ve now made some small additions to the post to better ensure readers do not get the impressions that you’re worried about. The substantive content of the post remains the same, and I have not read any disagreements with it, though please let me know if there are any.]
Thanks for clarifying. I see the connection between both sets of comments, but the draft comments still seem more like ‘it might be confusing whether this is about your experience in EA or an even-coverage history’, while the new comments seem more like ‘it might give the impression that Felicifia utilitarians and LessWrong rationalists had a bigger role, that GWWC and 80k didn’t have student groups, that EA wasn’t selected as a name for CEA in 2011, and that you had as much influence in building EA as a as Will or Toby.’ These seem meaningfully different, and while I adjusted for the former, I didn’t adjust for the latter.
(Again, I will add some qualification as soon as I can, e.g., noting that there were other student groups, which I’m happy to note but just didn’t because that is well-documented and not where I was personally most involved.)