User:Vipul/Effective altruism history as a social movement

(this will go in a new "History as a social movement" section on the effective altruism page)

The ideas behind effective altruism have undergirded practical ethics, particularly utilitarian and consequentialist practical ethics, for a fairly long time, and have been reflected in the writings of philosophers such as Peter Singer and Peter Unger, but the movement qua movement, with its existing institutional infrastructure and associated community, came into being only in the late 2000s.

Three of the earliest organizations that embodied some of the ideals of effective altruism were:


 * Charity evaluator GiveWell, founded in 2007 by Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, with the goal of evaluating charities to figure out what the best options were for making donations.
 * Giving What We Can, founded in November 2009 by Toby Ord, with prominent roles played by Toby, his wife Bernadette, and William MacAskill, with a focus on creating a community of people who pledged to donate a substantial portion of their income to alleviate global poverty.
 * 80,000 Hours, founded in October 2011 by William MacAskill and Benjamin Todd, with a focus on offering career selection advice to people who wanted to maximize the positive social impact of their lives.

According to William MacAskill, the name "effective altruism" emerged out of a mailing list discussion in November and December 2011 with the goal of figuring out a good name for an umbella organisation that would cover both Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours. The name eventually chosen was the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), and it won over the other options by a wide margin. A public Facebook group titled "Effective Altruists" (not affiliated with CEA or any other organisation) was created by Ruairi Donnelly in November 2012.

Peter Singer gave a TED talk about effective altruism in March 2013, that led to a surge in interest in the term and the idea.

The first Effective Altruism Summit was held in July 2013,  and the second Summit was in August 2014. At these summits, people approaching the idea of effective altruism from a variety of different perspectives gave talks and mingled together informally.

In September 2014, a new website called the Effective Altruism Forum was created with the goal of being a new hub for discussion of topics related to effective altruism (the site ported content from an earlier blog at the same URL, so some of its posts are dated to before its launch). The website was designed to be quite similar in look and feel to LessWrong, and used a similar codebase (derived from the source code for Reddit).