This ‘official’ account gives the impression that no term had much common currency, apart from the jokey ‘super-hardcore do-gooder’ before the end of 2011. I can’t comment about whether other branches of the community used terms in a similar way- I’ve never heard of felicifia.
http://www.effective-altruism.com/the-history-of-the-term-effective-altruism/
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.
This ‘official’ account gives the impression that no term had much common currency, apart from the jokey ‘super-hardcore do-gooder’ before the end of 2011. I can’t comment about whether other branches of the community used terms in a similar way- I’ve never heard of felicifia. http://www.effective-altruism.com/the-history-of-the-term-effective-altruism/
lukeprog (Luke Muehlhauser) objects to CEA’s claim that EA grew primarily out of Giving What We Can at http://www.effectivealtruism.org/#comments :
I agree with Luke here. CEA seems to often overstate its role in the EA movement (another example at http://centreforeffectivealtruism.org/).
I certainly agree that effective altruism existed long before GWWC.
The discussion I’m addressing though is about the origin of the term “effective altruist.”