How old is the effective altruism movement? It depends when you count
from, and it's hard to pick any specific day or event because it
coalesced out of a lot of different strands. Plus, since this is a
movement and not just an idea, it matters when it started gathering
people which is naturally very fuzzy. Roughly, I'd describe the
progression as something like:
At the beginning of 2008 there wasn't an EA movement yet, while by
2012 there was one. There wasn't an instantaneous change.
Why this particular curve? Here are some historical points that
anchor it to events:
In March 2012, I
wrote "there's a young movement that combines the idea of a
duty to help others with the idea that you should maximize the impact
of your actions," as part of trying to figure out what we should call
EA. I'd say it 100% existed by this point, and I wasn't "calling
it"—it existed before here.
In November 2011, 80,000 Hours launched.
It was mostly a way of spreading ideas that were already popular in
the Oxford community and online, so I'd also say the EA movement
existed before this. It's a bit less clear than when you have people
literally calling it a movement, though.
In December 2010, Roko Mijic ran a contest
on LessWrong for the best explanation of EA, which Scott Alexander won
with his essay, Efficient
Charity: Do Unto Others.... Jonah Sinick also wrote a detailed
entry, and Mass_Driver contributed
one as well. This feels very movementy to me: a bunch of people
working together to put some shared ideas into a form where they'll be
able to spread better.
In November 2009, the first 30 people joined Giving
What We Can. A group of people pledging to do something seems
like part of a movement. At the time GWWC was specific to global poverty, however,
so I wouldn't fully count this.
Over the course of 2009, discussion on the Felicifia forum (archive)
started to feel like an early EA community. For example, see thread
on charity
choice and the applied ethics
and philanthropy
boards.
In December 2006, the first GiveWell blog
post comes out. Looking back at it, and their other early posts,
you can tell that Holden and Elie had a lot of what has since become
EA in mind. This also goes for a lot of other early writing like Nick
Bostrom's 2003 post on astronomical
waste, Anand's 2003 SL4
"EffectiveAltruism" wiki entry, Brian Tomasik's 2006 post on earning
to give, and Eliezer Yudkowsky's 2007 post on scope
insensitivity (that coincidentally
used the term "effective altruist" years before it was settled
on). These are helpful for dating the ideas, but I'm looking for
when the ideas started gathering people and they seem to predate most
of that.
One thing I'm not putting much weight on here is the founding dates of
organizations. While many EA orgs have played a large role in the EA
movement, the oldest became EA over time instead of starting out that
way. For example, MIRI
was founded in ~2000 as SIAI, but was initially wasn't something you'd
recognize as EA and didn't have an associated community. It did grow
in both of these directions over time, but to the extent that this
helps us figure out the timeline of the movement we need to look at
those later developments. Similarly, ACE
could (but doesn't!) claim to have been founded in 2010 as JFA,
but before merging
with 80k's EAA
it had a pretty different focus.
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Another historical point I'd like to make is that the common narrative about EA's recent "pivot to longtermism" seems mostly wrong to me, or at least more partial and gradual than it's often presented to be, because all four leading strands of EA — (1) neartermist human-focused stuff, mostly in the developing world, (2) animal welfare, (3) long-term future, and (4) meta — were all major themes in the movement since its relatively early days, including at the very first "EA Summit" in 2013 (see here), and IIRC for at least a few years before then.
MacAskill was definitely a longtermist in 2012. But I don't think he mentioned it in Doing Good Better, or any of the more public/introductory narrative around EA.
I think the "pivot to longermism" narrative is a reaction to a change in communication strategy (80000 hours becoming explicitly longtermist, EA intro materials becoming mostly longtermist). I think critics see it as a "sharp left turn" in the AI Alignment sense, where the longtermist values were there all along but were much more dormant while EA was less powerful.
There's a previous discussion here
Not necessarily a deliberate strategy though -- my model is that EA started out fairly cause-neutral, people had lots of discussions about the best causes, and longtermist causes gradually emerged as the best.
E.g. in 2012 Holden Karnofsky wrote:
I think a lot of people moved from "I agree others matter regardless of where, or when, they are but figuring out how to help people in the future isn't very tractable" to "ok, now I see some ways to do this, and it's important enough that we really need to try".
Or maybe this was just my trajectory (2011, 2018, 2022) and I'm projecting a bit...
I don't think anyone is denying that longtermist and existential risk concerns were part of the movement from the beginning. Or think that longtermist concerns don't belong in a movement about doing the most good. I think the concern is around the shift from longtermist concerns existing relatively equally with other cause areas to becoming much more dominant. Longtermism is much more prominent both in terms of funding and attention given to longtermism in community growth and introductory materials.