Will and Toby are arguably the man founders of the EA movement
FWIW, I think this is false as stated; several others have played a similarly large (or larger role) in my view, and in general it was more decentralized than it might seem. E.g., Bostrom, Holden, Eliezer seem similarly/more important to me, and I probably forgot some names.
The main difference between Will / Toby and those other names is that Will and Toby deliberately marketed themselves as EA co-founders on a couple of occasions, whereas the others didn’t.
Disagree. Many people have made important contributions over the years, but that doesn’t make them founders of the effective altruism movement.
Givewell were doing great research at the same time and probably have the next best claim, but they were explicitly neither trying to create a community nor encourage altruism per se (IIRC their early tagline was something like ‘don’t give more, give well’).
Bostrom wrote a couple of essays that eventually became seminal but otherwise hasn’t really engaged with the community—or, I would argue, published anything particularly significant to it since 2003 (perhaps excepting Superintelligence, which is mainly a trade book summarising what various people had written well before that point). Similarly seminal ideas came from Brian Tomasik, who wrote countless essays that inspired many people to make substantial changes to their behaviour, and Peters Singer and Unger for writing impassioned calls for people to act like EAs perhaps a little before it was culturally feasible—the first two of whom have been far more involved as the movement developed.
Eliezer started a forum, wrote a lot of fanfic and told people paperclipping AI was the main threat to humanity; there’s room for wide disagreement on the value of that, but I wouldn’t call it starting a movement—and if it was, it wasn’t the effective altruism movement (which still doesn’t seem particularly mainstream on Less Wrong, and whose non-AI concerns were notoriously dismissed as a ‘rounding error’ by rationalists at early EA meetups). Seth Baum collected a bunch of people on the original Felicifia who were smaller in number but far more committed to the ethos of optimising general do-gooding, rather than focusing on one narrow cause area.
Also Zell Kravinsky continues to be massively underappreciated for taking all of these ideas more seriously than even their authors did, and earning to give decades before it was cool—not to mention being the first undirected organ donor (and he was ridiculed and in many cases even vilified by the media for it).
You could make a case for any of these people having the most counterfactual value, but Giving What We Can was the project that explicitly sought to build a movement, and that was almost all done by Will and Toby.
I really disagree with this and think it’s an incorrect representation of the actual history of the EA community.
Whether someone was intending to grow a large movement seems much less important than whether someone actually did. (I.e., whether they made seminal contributions to the ideas and culture of the community that actually helped create the community.)
GWWC seems pretty unimportant in the grander scheme of things compared to other organizations, books, ideas, etc. E.g., I think Will’s contributions to 80K, DGB, etc. seem more important than GWWC.
Right now I don’t feel compelled to write a more elaborate response, but if this false founding myth keeps coming up I might write a longer post at some point.
I mostly agree with you, Jonas, but I think you’re using the phrase “founder” in a confusing way. I think a founder is someone who is directly involved in establishing an organisation. Contributions that are indirect like Bostrom and Eliezer’s, or that come after the organisation is started (like DGB) may be very important, but don’t make them founders. I would probably totally agree with you if you just said you’re answering a different question: “Who caused EA to be what it is today?”
80k certainly helped get the word out, as did DGB, but there was already a growing collection of people working on GWWC by the time 80k started (and 80k itself was basically an outgrowth of the GWWC project), and by the time of DGB, the movement was already well enough established to have had multiple EAG-like events. Growing it is not founding it (and as you say, Will was highly involved with early efforts to do the former).
I don’t think we’re going to agree on this emphasis, which is obviously fine, but I don’t think you should be calling it a ‘false founding myth’ until you’ve made a much stronger case.
FWIW, I think this is false as stated; several others have played a similarly large (or larger role) in my view, and in general it was more decentralized than it might seem. E.g., Bostrom, Holden, Eliezer seem similarly/more important to me, and I probably forgot some names.
The main difference between Will / Toby and those other names is that Will and Toby deliberately marketed themselves as EA co-founders on a couple of occasions, whereas the others didn’t.
Disagree. Many people have made important contributions over the years, but that doesn’t make them founders of the effective altruism movement.
Givewell were doing great research at the same time and probably have the next best claim, but they were explicitly neither trying to create a community nor encourage altruism per se (IIRC their early tagline was something like ‘don’t give more, give well’).
Bostrom wrote a couple of essays that eventually became seminal but otherwise hasn’t really engaged with the community—or, I would argue, published anything particularly significant to it since 2003 (perhaps excepting Superintelligence, which is mainly a trade book summarising what various people had written well before that point). Similarly seminal ideas came from Brian Tomasik, who wrote countless essays that inspired many people to make substantial changes to their behaviour, and Peters Singer and Unger for writing impassioned calls for people to act like EAs perhaps a little before it was culturally feasible—the first two of whom have been far more involved as the movement developed.
Eliezer started a forum, wrote a lot of fanfic and told people paperclipping AI was the main threat to humanity; there’s room for wide disagreement on the value of that, but I wouldn’t call it starting a movement—and if it was, it wasn’t the effective altruism movement (which still doesn’t seem particularly mainstream on Less Wrong, and whose non-AI concerns were notoriously dismissed as a ‘rounding error’ by rationalists at early EA meetups). Seth Baum collected a bunch of people on the original Felicifia who were smaller in number but far more committed to the ethos of optimising general do-gooding, rather than focusing on one narrow cause area.
Also Zell Kravinsky continues to be massively underappreciated for taking all of these ideas more seriously than even their authors did, and earning to give decades before it was cool—not to mention being the first undirected organ donor (and he was ridiculed and in many cases even vilified by the media for it).
You could make a case for any of these people having the most counterfactual value, but Giving What We Can was the project that explicitly sought to build a movement, and that was almost all done by Will and Toby.
I really disagree with this and think it’s an incorrect representation of the actual history of the EA community.
Whether someone was intending to grow a large movement seems much less important than whether someone actually did. (I.e., whether they made seminal contributions to the ideas and culture of the community that actually helped create the community.)
GWWC seems pretty unimportant in the grander scheme of things compared to other organizations, books, ideas, etc. E.g., I think Will’s contributions to 80K, DGB, etc. seem more important than GWWC.
Right now I don’t feel compelled to write a more elaborate response, but if this false founding myth keeps coming up I might write a longer post at some point.
I mostly agree with you, Jonas, but I think you’re using the phrase “founder” in a confusing way. I think a founder is someone who is directly involved in establishing an organisation. Contributions that are indirect like Bostrom and Eliezer’s, or that come after the organisation is started (like DGB) may be very important, but don’t make them founders. I would probably totally agree with you if you just said you’re answering a different question: “Who caused EA to be what it is today?”
Hmm, but EA isn’t an organization, it’s a movement. I don’t really know what it even means to say that a movement has co-founders …
80k certainly helped get the word out, as did DGB, but there was already a growing collection of people working on GWWC by the time 80k started (and 80k itself was basically an outgrowth of the GWWC project), and by the time of DGB, the movement was already well enough established to have had multiple EAG-like events. Growing it is not founding it (and as you say, Will was highly involved with early efforts to do the former).
I don’t think we’re going to agree on this emphasis, which is obviously fine, but I don’t think you should be calling it a ‘false founding myth’ until you’ve made a much stronger case.