The people with high amounts of disposable income who also are philosophically minded enough to notice and care about altruism and effectiveness tend to be computer programmers. Such careers are relatively recent.
The rise of high-quality evidence for what works in aid is relatively recent.
I don’t know how strong the connection is, but the growth of the EA movement seems to be strongly connected to the rise in atheism. Any common cause for both is probably relatively recent.
The growth of the movement probably depends on the internet in some large part, and the internet is relatively recent.
I’d expect the internet to make many minority causes and interests more successful by letting their rare supporters get together, and I think it has had this effect. However that doesn’t seem to explain why they are minority causes to begin with.
Do you mean that before computer programming the philosophically minded just didn’t have lucrative professions?
Have we recently passed some threshold in high quality evidence for what works in aid? I’d expect in future we think of 2014 level of evidence as low, and still say we only recently got good evidence.
Before the internet, it probably didn’t make sense to organise around such a high level of abstraction away from concrete goals. Before the modern economy it probably didn’t make that much sense to invest so much time into thinking about alternatives in this way, and some utilitarians seem to have done so anyway.
Some other potential reasons:
The people with high amounts of disposable income who also are philosophically minded enough to notice and care about altruism and effectiveness tend to be computer programmers. Such careers are relatively recent.
The rise of high-quality evidence for what works in aid is relatively recent.
I don’t know how strong the connection is, but the growth of the EA movement seems to be strongly connected to the rise in atheism. Any common cause for both is probably relatively recent.
The growth of the movement probably depends on the internet in some large part, and the internet is relatively recent.
Interesting suggestions.
I’d expect the internet to make many minority causes and interests more successful by letting their rare supporters get together, and I think it has had this effect. However that doesn’t seem to explain why they are minority causes to begin with.
Do you mean that before computer programming the philosophically minded just didn’t have lucrative professions?
Have we recently passed some threshold in high quality evidence for what works in aid? I’d expect in future we think of 2014 level of evidence as low, and still say we only recently got good evidence.
Before the internet, it probably didn’t make sense to organise around such a high level of abstraction away from concrete goals. Before the modern economy it probably didn’t make that much sense to invest so much time into thinking about alternatives in this way, and some utilitarians seem to have done so anyway.