Thanks for the additional research. I can add a few more things:
‘Carl Shulman’ commented on the GiveWell blog on December 31, 2007, seemingly familiar with GiveWell and having a positive impression of it at the time. This is presumably Carl Shulman (EA forum user Carl_Shulman), longtime EA and member of the rationality community.
Robert Wiblin’s earliest post on Overcoming Bias dates back to June 22, 2012.
The earliest post of LessWrong user ‘jkaufman’ (presumably longtime EA Jeff Kaufman) dates back to 25th September 2011.
There’s some discussion of the history of EA as connected with different communities on this LessWrong comment thread. User ‘thebestwecan’ (addressed as ‘Jacy’ by another comment, so presumably Jacy Reese) stated that the term ‘Effective Altruism’ was used several years in the Felicifia community before CEA adopted the term, but jkaufman’s Google search could only find the term going back to 2012. This comment is also interesting:
This was a pretty surprising sentence. Weren’t LessWrong & GiveWell growing large, important parts of the community before GWWC existed? It wasn’t called “effective altruism” at the time, but it was largely the same ideas and people.′
So apparently Luke Muehlhauser, an important and well connected member of the rationality community, believed that important parts of the EA community came from LW and GW before GWWC existed. This seems to exclude the idea that EA grew primarily out of LW.
Overall it seems to me that my earlier summary of EA growing out of the connected communities of GiveWell, Oxford (GWWC, people like Toby Ord and Will MacAskill etc), and LessWrong is probably correct.
Thanks for the additional research. I can add a few more things:
‘Carl Shulman’ commented on the GiveWell blog on December 31, 2007, seemingly familiar with GiveWell and having a positive impression of it at the time. This is presumably Carl Shulman (EA forum user Carl_Shulman), longtime EA and member of the rationality community.
Robert Wiblin’s earliest post on Overcoming Bias dates back to June 22, 2012.
The earliest post of LessWrong user ‘jkaufman’ (presumably longtime EA Jeff Kaufman) dates back to 25th September 2011.
There’s some discussion of the history of EA as connected with different communities on this LessWrong comment thread. User ‘thebestwecan’ (addressed as ‘Jacy’ by another comment, so presumably Jacy Reese) stated that the term ‘Effective Altruism’ was used several years in the Felicifia community before CEA adopted the term, but jkaufman’s Google search could only find the term going back to 2012. This comment is also interesting:
’lukeprog (Luke Muehlhauser) objects to CEA’s claim that EA grew primarily out of Giving What We Can at http://www.effectivealtruism.org/#comments :
So apparently Luke Muehlhauser, an important and well connected member of the rationality community, believed that important parts of the EA community came from LW and GW before GWWC existed. This seems to exclude the idea that EA grew primarily out of LW.
Overall it seems to me that my earlier summary of EA growing out of the connected communities of GiveWell, Oxford (GWWC, people like Toby Ord and Will MacAskill etc), and LessWrong is probably correct.