[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.)
[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.)