Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum

Comment Permalink
Jeff Kaufman 🔸2
0
0

Copying the text here in case the archive.is copy is lost:

Whether you have $100 or $100 million that you can apply to improving humanity's condition, there are more effective and less effective ways to use that money. For example, say you want to donate $1,000 to an AIDS foundation, possibly one that attempts to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa, or one that works on figuring out how to control HIV itself, so that people can live with the virus. Giving to such a foundation is an altruistic act, a good deed, and thus by itself wonderful and commendable. It's certainly more altruistic to give $1000 to an AIDS foundation than to buy someone you care for $1000 in material possessions; possessions they don't need in any important sense. However, if the person with $1000 was aware, or became aware, of a way that they could use their money to help achieve a much greater and longer lasting altruistic impact on humanity, even though that way was less emotionally satisfying than helping AIDS victims, then it would be more helpful, more altruistic, and achieve greater lasting good if they used their money in the second way.

Everything that I know about trying to do what's good, which includes trying to figure out how to do what's good, tells me that supporting the second way is preferable to supporting the AIDS foundation (that's not to say that supporting such a foundation isn't worthwhile or important!), and certainly more preferable than using the money on jewelry. To my knowledge, the best known examples of the second way are SingularityExplicitAndImplicitWork; the most effectively altruistic forms of work that one can presently do. -- Anand

It is also worth noting that "IntuitiveSelfishness" is not the same thing as "RationalSelfishness" or "EffectiveSelfishness". --observer

Last edited October 4, 2003 1:19 am by Observer

Reply
See in context
by William_MacAskill
5 min read 9

54

Building effective altruismHistory of effective altruism80,000 HoursCommunity experiencesGiving What We Can
Frontpage

A few people have expressed interest recently in the origins of the effective altruism community. I realized that not that many people know where the term 'effective altruism' came from, nor that there was a painfully long amount of time spent deciding on it. And it was fun digging through the old emails. So here's an overview of what happened!

The need to decide upon a name came from two sources:

First, the Giving What We Can (GWWC) community was growing. 80,000 Hours (80k) had soft-launched in February 2011, moving the focus in Oxford away from just charity and onto ethical life-optimisation more generally. There was also a growing realization among the GWWC and 80k Directors that the best thing for us each to be doing was to encourage more people to use their life to do good as effectively as possible (which is now usually called 'movement-building').

Second, GWWC and 80k were planning to incorporate as a charity under an 'umbrella' name, so that we could take paid staff (decided approx. Aug 2011; I was Managing Director of GWWC at the time and was pushing for this, with Michelle Hutchinson and Holly Morgan as the first planned staff members). So we needed a name for that umbrella organization (the working title was 'High Impact Alliance'). We were also just starting to realize the importance of good marketing, and therefore willing to put more time into things like choice of name.

At the time, there were a host of related terms: on 12 March 2012 Jeff Kaufman posted on this, listing 'smart giving', 'efficient charity', 'optimal philanthropy', among others. Most of the terms these referred to charity specifically. The one term that was commonly used to refer to people who were trying to use their lives to do good effectively was the tongue-in-cheek 'super-hardcore do-gooder'. It was pretty clear we needed a new name! I summarized this in an email to the 80k team (then the 'High Impact Careers' team) on 13 October 2011:

We need a name for "someone who pursues a high impact lifestyle".  This has been such an obstacle in the utilitarianesque community - 'do-gooder' is the current term, and it sucks."
What happened, then, is that there was a period of brainstorming - combining different terms like 'effective', 'efficient', 'rational' with 'altruism', 'benevolence', 'charity'. Then the Directors of GWWC and 80k decided, in November 2011, to aggregate everyone's views and make a final decision by vote. This vote would decide both the name of the type of person we wanted to refer to, and for the name of the organization we were setting up.

Those who voted were as follows (I think, but am not certain, that this is complete):

  • Will MacAskill (then 'Crouch')
  • Toby Ord
  • Nick Beckstead
  • Michelle Hutchinson
  • Holly Morgan
  • Mark Lee
  • Tom Ash
  • Matt Wage
  • Ben Todd
  • Tom Rowlands
  • Niel Bowerman
  • Robbie Shade
  • Matt Gibb
  • Richard Batty
  • Sally Murray
  • Rob Gledhill
  • Andreas Mogensen
Tom Rowlands, who was then Director of Communications for both GWWC and 80k, sent round the following email on 3 December 2011:
I've been through all the suggestions on the umbrella name - thanks.The names that have arisen mostly reflect two components: an ethical position i.e. 'good' and optimizing this i.e. 'maximisation'We might also want a name for 'group'.[I've deliberately used the above words as they didn't arise in the suggestions, to avoid bias.]For these reasons, I've split the voting into three parts, based on these categories - to do otherwise would make it almost incoherent. The downside is this doesn't really account for acronyms and combinations (you might like three of the terms in isolation, but don't like them as a group).So, please consider the options in the three categories, before coming up with up to three names you like together:e.g. Good Maximisation Group

1:

a) altruist b) do-gooder c) utilitarian d) humanist e) empathetic f) philanthropist g) consequentialist h) positive i) benetarian

2:

a) hardcore b) dedicated c) rational d) professional e) optimal f) high impact g) evidence-based h) effective i) biggest

3:

a) alliance b) group c) centre d) community e) institute f) network g) association

You might not think all three components are necessary, in which case just use the ones you think are e.g. Good Maximisers.

If you completely disagree with the methodology, please say so and I'll come up with another. I did spend some time considering this!

Sorry we haven't got to the voting yet, but it seemed like this is a necessary step on the way there.

Please send me your ideas by 2100 Sunday. I'll then send another email with a shortlist to vote on. [Michelle - I hope this meets the deadline; sorry if not)

From non-snowy Val Thorens,

Tom

And on 5 December 2011 there was a vote, for what the name of the new umbrella organization should be. The shortlist was:
  • Rational Altruist Community RAC
  • Effective Utilitarian Community EUC
  • Evidence-based Charity Association ECA
  • Alliance for Rational Compassion ARC
  • Evidence-based Philanthropy Association EPA
  • High Impact Alliance HIA
  • Association for Evidence-Based Altruism AEA
  • Optimal Altruism Network OAN
  • High Impact Altruist Network HIAN
  • Rational Altruist Network RAN
  • Association of Optimal Altruists AON
  • Centre for Effective Altruism CEA
  • Centre for Rational Altruism CRA
  • Big Visions Network BVN
  • Optimal Altruists Forum OAF
(There was actually two other votes, too: one on whether to use 'Effective' rather than 'rational' or 'strategic'; and one on whether to use 'Centre' rather than anything else. Tom expressed how arduous the name-decision process had been - after this list he said "Again, apologies for the way this process has gone. I'll try to keep the last couple of days relatively pain-free."  I remember Matt Wage commenting that he thought that this whole process was a really ineffective use of time. But it seems to have been worth it in retrospect!)

In the vote, CEA won, by quite a clear margin. Different people had been pushing for different names. I remember that Michelle preferred "Rational Altruism", the Leverage folks preferred "Strategic Altruism," and I was pushing for '"Effective Altruism". But no-one had terribly strong views, so everyone was happy to go with the name we voted on. GiveWell was using "rational altruism" for a while after that point (e.g. here and here), before switching to "effective altruism".

We hadn't planned 'effective altruism' to take off in the way that it did. 'Centre for Effective Altruism' was intended not to have a public presence at all, and just be a legal entity. I had thought that effective altruism was too abstract an idea for it to really catch on, and had a disagreement with Mark Lee and Geoff Anders about this. Time proved them correct on that point!

After that, the term was used progressively more, as 80,000 Hours started using it (e.g. this was the go-to page on effective altruism for quite a while, published 5th March 2012) and THINK was set up to promote effective altruism specifically. Ruairí Donnelly set up the Effective Altruists Facebook group in November 2012. Then I think what really solidified the term was Peter Singer's TED talk, which was filmed in March 2013, and posted on-line in May 2013.

54

0
0

Reactions

0
0
Mentioned in
Load more (5/15)

More posts like this

Comments9


Sorted by
New & upvoted
Click to highlight new comments since:
Dale8
0
0

Interesting history!

However, I think you are being unfair to MIRI. Eliezer was using the term as as far back as 2007, four years before you mention it first being used in Oxford. So it wasn't originated in Oxford. And given that many CEA members have read LessWrong, including Toby Ord, it's seems a stretch to even say it was independently re-invented.

Reply
EliezerYudkowsky59
0
0

There's only so many things you can call it, and accidental namespace collisions / phrase reinventions aren't surprising. I was surprised when I looked back myself and noticed the phrase was there, so it would be more surprising if Toby Ord remembered than if he didn't. I'm proud to have used the term "effective altruist" once in 2007, but to say that this means I coined the term, especially when it was re-output by the more careful process described above, might be giving me too much credit - but it's still nice to have this not-quite-coincidental mention be remembered, so thank you for that!

Reply
Sebastian_Farquhar6
0
0

I remember one of my favourites for the name of CEA as the Federation for Effective Altruism Research. Or the Society for the Progress of Empathetic Consequentialism Through Reasoned Evaluation. I think the first may have been yours, Will. ;)

Reply
William_MacAskill23
0
0

Hahaha. Another one of mine was "Institute for the Development of Effective Altruism" (IDEA - which came second to CEA... I'm glad it did!) As was "The High Impact NetworK" (THINK), which I was pleased to see got taken on.

Reply
EricHerboso3
0
0

notacleverthrow-away on Reddit points out that there's an even earlier usage of the term on the SL4 wiki by Anand from way back in January 2003! Here's the page on EffectiveAltruism on sl4.org.

Reply
Jeff Kaufman 🔸2
0
0

Copying the text here in case the archive.is copy is lost:

Whether you have $100 or $100 million that you can apply to improving humanity's condition, there are more effective and less effective ways to use that money. For example, say you want to donate $1,000 to an AIDS foundation, possibly one that attempts to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa, or one that works on figuring out how to control HIV itself, so that people can live with the virus. Giving to such a foundation is an altruistic act, a good deed, and thus by itself wonderful and commendable. It's certainly more altruistic to give $1000 to an AIDS foundation than to buy someone you care for $1000 in material possessions; possessions they don't need in any important sense. However, if the person with $1000 was aware, or became aware, of a way that they could use their money to help achieve a much greater and longer lasting altruistic impact on humanity, even though that way was less emotionally satisfying than helping AIDS victims, then it would be more helpful, more altruistic, and achieve greater lasting good if they used their money in the second way.

Everything that I know about trying to do what's good, which includes trying to figure out how to do what's good, tells me that supporting the second way is preferable to supporting the AIDS foundation (that's not to say that supporting such a foundation isn't worthwhile or important!), and certainly more preferable than using the money on jewelry. To my knowledge, the best known examples of the second way are SingularityExplicitAndImplicitWork; the most effectively altruistic forms of work that one can presently do. -- Anand

It is also worth noting that "IntuitiveSelfishness" is not the same thing as "RationalSelfishness" or "EffectiveSelfishness". --observer

Last edited October 4, 2003 1:19 am by Observer

Reply
Austen_Forrester3
0
0

Fascinating! I've always wondered about the genesis of effective altruism, including the name. You definitely chose the best name; one that will survive the ages. The name makes it easier to explain to people why I think I'm helping others by working at an oil plant. As soon as I use the word "effective", people STHU. How can you argue with effectiveness?. Rational is accurate, but a little dry, and somewhat off-putting for the faithful.

Reply
Michael_Dickens3
0
0

I think it's funny that I have been involved in EA since before the term came into popular use, but I can't remember it ever not being called "effective altruism."

Reply
Pablo_Stafforini22
0
0

See this post by Jeff Kaufman for a list of names that were in use before 'effective altruism' became established.

Reply
More from William_MacAskill
View more
Curated and popular this week
LintzA
 ·  · 15m read
 · 
Cross-posted to Lesswrong Introduction Several developments over the past few months should cause you to re-evaluate what you are doing. These include: 1. Updates toward short timelines 2. The Trump presidency 3. The o1 (inference-time compute scaling) paradigm 4. Deepseek 5. Stargate/AI datacenter spending 6. Increased internal deployment 7. Absence of AI x-risk/safety considerations in mainstream AI discourse Taken together, these are enough to render many existing AI governance strategies obsolete (and probably some technical safety strategies too). There's a good chance we're entering crunch time and that should absolutely affect your theory of change and what you plan to work on. In this piece I try to give a quick summary of these developments and think through the broader implications these have for AI safety. At the end of the piece I give some quick initial thoughts on how these developments affect what safety-concerned folks should be prioritizing. These are early days and I expect many of my takes will shift, look forward to discussing in the comments!  Implications of recent developments Updates toward short timelines There’s general agreement that timelines are likely to be far shorter than most expected. Both Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have recently said they expect AGI within the next 3 years. Anecdotally, nearly everyone I know or have heard of who was expecting longer timelines has updated significantly toward short timelines (<5 years). E.g. Ajeya’s median estimate is that 99% of fully-remote jobs will be automatable in roughly 6-8 years, 5+ years earlier than her 2023 estimate. On a quick look, prediction markets seem to have shifted to short timelines (e.g. Metaculus[1] & Manifold appear to have roughly 2030 median timelines to AGI, though haven’t moved dramatically in recent months). We’ve consistently seen performance on benchmarks far exceed what most predicted. Most recently, Epoch was surprised to see OpenAI’s o3 model achi
Dr Kassim
 ·  · 4m read
 · 
Hey everyone, I’ve been going through the EA Introductory Program, and I have to admit some of these ideas make sense, but others leave me with more questions than answers. I’m trying to wrap my head around certain core EA principles, and the more I think about them, the more I wonder: Am I misunderstanding, or are there blind spots in EA’s approach? I’d really love to hear what others think. Maybe you can help me clarify some of my doubts. Or maybe you share the same reservations? Let’s talk. Cause Prioritization. Does It Ignore Political and Social Reality? EA focuses on doing the most good per dollar, which makes sense in theory. But does it hold up when you apply it to real world contexts especially in countries like Uganda? Take malaria prevention. It’s a top EA cause because it’s highly cost effective $5,000 can save a life through bed nets (GiveWell, 2023). But what happens when government corruption or instability disrupts these programs? The Global Fund scandal in Uganda saw $1.6 million in malaria aid mismanaged (Global Fund Audit Report, 2016). If money isn’t reaching the people it’s meant to help, is it really the best use of resources? And what about leadership changes? Policies shift unpredictably here. A national animal welfare initiative I supported lost momentum when political priorities changed. How does EA factor in these uncertainties when prioritizing causes? It feels like EA assumes a stable world where money always achieves the intended impact. But what if that’s not the world we live in? Long termism. A Luxury When the Present Is in Crisis? I get why long termists argue that future people matter. But should we really prioritize them over people suffering today? Long termism tells us that existential risks like AI could wipe out trillions of future lives. But in Uganda, we’re losing lives now—1,500+ die from rabies annually (WHO, 2021), and 41% of children suffer from stunting due to malnutrition (UNICEF, 2022). These are preventable d
Rory Fenton
 ·  · 6m read
 · 
Cross-posted from my blog. Contrary to my carefully crafted brand as a weak nerd, I go to a local CrossFit gym a few times a week. Every year, the gym raises funds for a scholarship for teens from lower-income families to attend their summer camp program. I don’t know how many Crossfit-interested low-income teens there are in my small town, but I’ll guess there are perhaps 2 of them who would benefit from the scholarship. After all, CrossFit is pretty niche, and the town is small. Helping youngsters get swole in the Pacific Northwest is not exactly as cost-effective as preventing malaria in Malawi. But I notice I feel drawn to supporting the scholarship anyway. Every time it pops in my head I think, “My money could fully solve this problem”. The camp only costs a few hundred dollars per kid and if there are just 2 kids who need support, I could give $500 and there would no longer be teenagers in my town who want to go to a CrossFit summer camp but can’t. Thanks to me, the hero, this problem would be entirely solved. 100%. That is not how most nonprofit work feels to me. You are only ever making small dents in important problems I want to work on big problems. Global poverty. Malaria. Everyone not suddenly dying. But if I’m honest, what I really want is to solve those problems. Me, personally, solve them. This is a continued source of frustration and sadness because I absolutely cannot solve those problems. Consider what else my $500 CrossFit scholarship might do: * I want to save lives, and USAID suddenly stops giving $7 billion a year to PEPFAR. So I give $500 to the Rapid Response Fund. My donation solves 0.000001% of the problem and I feel like I have failed. * I want to solve climate change, and getting to net zero will require stopping or removing emissions of 1,500 billion tons of carbon dioxide. I give $500 to a policy nonprofit that reduces emissions, in expectation, by 50 tons. My donation solves 0.000000003% of the problem and I feel like I have f
Recent opportunities in Building effective altruism
3
Apply to become a Futurekind AI Facilitator or Mentor (deadline: April 10)
Jay Luong
· · 2m read
0
0
35
AIS Netherlands is looking for a Founding Executive Director (EOI form)
7 authors
· · 5m read
4
4
33
Announcing the Vancouver Forum for Effective Altruism, April 4-5
Danielle MacLean
· · 1m read
4
4
View more