tl;dr I think origin stories are useful. Please share yours if you like. Here's mine.
Introduction
I generally find "origin stories" - personal accounts of how people first become involved with EA - to be quite illuminating, and I think that the bulk of their value comes from their aggregation. We have a lot of data on this at a high level, but I would expect a much smaller number of stories at a much finer level of granularity to be about as useful. You might notice particular communities that many EA folk were involved in before EA. You might see particular articles, individuals, ideas or events that were common formative moments for people. Or you might spot common features of paths of people from underrepresented groups in EA[1]. All of these things can help inform more effective strategies for community-building.
I often ask about origin stories in person. (Pro tip: "Why are you here?" is great for clickbait, bit confrontational for a first meeting; try "How did you get involved in EA?", "What was it about EA that first appealed to you?", "What brings you here today?" or even simply "What's your story? Tell me more about you.") But it's very difficult for me or others to spot trends in a collection of anecdotes stored in my brain, so I invite you all to share your story here. If you'd like me to share it anonymously on your behalf, you can share it here. Readers, don't forget the sampling bias we have, e.g. if "I used to be part of this other online forum" comes up a lot in these stories, no that does not mean that EA folk basically all love online forums.
Share as much as you wish to. One line is fine. If longer, don't feel that you need to explain any gaps or vagueness (but of course, please don't be deliberately misleading). Don't censor yourself too much with the thought that "Oh that's probably just me - that bit won't be useful for spotting trends". And consider including any "sub" origin stories that are applicable e.g. How did you first join an offline or online community? What's the story behind your first significant donation or altruistically-motivated career change? When have you made a significant shift in cause prioritisation and why?
I'll go first.
Why I'm here
Childhood
Thanks to an obsession with record-keeping and a good memory, I can see some very early roots. As a child I had a standard magic wish: "Happiness for everyone forever." I (told myself I) killed spiders because that's one quick death for a spider against many flies being slowly eaten alive. My favourite games were "schools" i.e. "teach my sister to read despite her protests" and "boat crash"/"plane crash" i.e. "all of my toys are on the verge of death and we manage to save them all". A consequentialist hero syndrome if ever there was one.
Early teens
In my early teens, teachers and friends prompted me to think more about ethics and rationality within the context of religion. I ended a school essay on abortion with "if there's no pain, there's no problem" (referring to the foetus). I went to church for two years for reasoning similar to Pascal's Wager, despite this choice generally leading to a lot of misery for me and everyone around me. At this particular church, I was made fun of for considering Islam and for Googling for more questions about Christianity rather than for answers, and the judgements of my romantic life really stung, but my poor fellow churchgoers did try so hard with me and must have thought me mad for attending for so long as a very anguished agnostic.
At some point in this period I also became a moral non-cognitivist (thought that "right", "wrong", "good", "bad" etc. didn't refer to anything fundamental in the universe) - I'd gained more appreciation for the influence of society on our so-called "moral" beliefs, and I couldn't conceive of what it would mean for anything to really matter. I wrote in my diary: "The meaning of life is that there is no meaning".
Mid teens
Still, my interest in the fundamental questions about life persisted and at the age of 16 I discovered philosophy. Yes! This was it! I devoured the subject, spending nearly every spare moment of college in the library, filling ringbinders with notes and discussing philosophy with anyone who'd humour me. As with religion, I struggled to understand how other people could go about their lives without giving these questions serious thought. "Sure," I thought, "philosophy is notorious for its lack of progress, but that's in part because its successes split off into new disciplines and in any case, don't you all at least want to try??" I discovered Peter Singer's work and loved his rational approach to ethics. At some point I was walking home, and I still remember the place where I stopped as a thought hit me: "Happiness is intrinsically good". There's little more I can say about that, but suffice it to say that from that moment on I have been a moral cognitivist. Perhaps nothing actually matters, but I think that contemplation of a particular feature of direct experience has allowed me to at least conceive of something really, ultimately "mattering".
Thanks to my new-found moral cognitivism built around what felt like an insight - happiness is intrinsically good - I focused my philosophy A-level on ethics where I could, and contributed to my sixth form's Activists' Society.
Beyond this "insight" and basic principles of rationality, I hadn't yet come across anything that seemed relevant to what was ultimately right or wrong (I wasn't thinking about useful day-to-day moral habits, intuitions or heuristics yet, reasoning that that could only come after I had some fundamental principles in place to draw from). Except perhaps my own rather extreme risk-aversion when it comes to my personal safety, and I wondered if I should conclude from that that our moral obligations are always with the worst-off. For a while, my top candidate ethical theories were classical utilitarianism and what I called "bar consequentialism" (until I found existing terms for similar ideas) - basically the idea that we should always focus entirely on trying to increase the happiness of whoever is suffering the most in the world. Utilitarianism didn't seem to put enough weight on avoiding suffering, and "bar consequentialism" seemed ridiculous for attributing no value to any increases in happiness or alleviation of suffering unless the subject was the worst-off person in existence, but any way of combining the two seemed arbitrary. Prioritarianism (whereby if you're suffering more then it becomes more important - but not exclusively important - to help you) showed some promise, but then I concluded that it was actually just the same as classical utilitarianism, and that I could just be a classical utilitarian who puts relatively large numbers on extreme suffering when it comes to judgements around exactly which experiences count as exactly which degrees of happiness/suffering. Nice. Utilitarianism it is. Job done.
Not quite. I was still far from certain, and although I knew that a lifetime would not be long enough to find answers, I was going to do my best. I drew up a life plan that involved studying ethics through philosophy (and, to some extent, theology) as a career at the best university I could get into, publishing whatever I learnt and donating what I could.
Alongside all my philosophising at sixth form I'd been stepping up my altruistic behaviour. I thought most farm animals probably had happy lives even though some of them were awful, so it was fine to eat meat because otherwise those animals wouldn't exist at all. Then I realised one day that this was the wrong way to think about it - that the awful lives were really awful, and since we didn't really know where our meat came from, we shouldn't take the chance - and declared myself a vegetarian in the same breath. I donated to and volunteered for several charities. And I took over the Activists' Society when no one else would (a habit picked up from math class where I felt despised for putting my hand up and getting the answer right, but I nevertheless wanted the lesson to progress...also a behaviour I'd repeat a few times in the years to come). I learnt about perceived self-righteousness quickly, and we rebranded as the self-deprecating Save The World Club. I don't know why my altruistic motivation steadily increased over this period, but it did.
Late teens to present
I moved to Oxford for university and soon heard about this society that had just launched called Giving What We Can. What an awesome project! I attended a talk by the founder, Toby Ord, on vegetarianism and remember thinking, "It's another Peter Singer".
My mental health declined at Oxford (as I thought it probably would) and I sent emails to Peter Singer and Toby Ord asking for advice about whether to drop out, saying "When other people are giving me advice they never factor in the 'ethics' part anywhere near as much as I do so its not always that helpful." They made time for me and told me what I expected to hear, but I really valued the reassurance of hearing someone else say it. I dropped out.
But I maintained my connection to Oxford. At the first Giving What We Can talk I attended I audibly gasped at the differences in cost-effectiveness estimates from the DCP2 report. I met one of the Felicifia admins at the talk and became an enthusiastic user; for some reason I'd never thought to Google "utilitarianism forum". It was there that I came across the wonderfully concise line: "Utilitarianism and Nihilism are the only ethical systems that make any sense. If nihilism is true, it doesn't matter what I do, so I might as well assume it's false." (I'm nowhere near that confident of course, but it's a nice summary of why I don't bother thinking about the possibility of nihilism any more.) There was some overlap between the Giving What We Can crew and the transhumanists/rationalists and one of the people in this overlap told me the astronomical waste argument at a pub meet-up. I thought it was ridiculous. Then I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on why it was sensible. I kept up my co-leadership of the Oxford anti-genocide society for a while (so chosen because I figured the most effective ways to maximise happiness might still be to focus on the worst-off, and I couldn't think of anything worse), but eventually my co-leadership of the new Giving What We Can: Oxford society took over. I also launched another charitable student society at one point but eventually that too was handed on so that I could focus more on the emerging "Effective Altruism" movement. I couldn't get enough of it. In those early years I learnt so much, never failed to be excited at first meetings with like-minded souls, and attended several retreats where I experienced a very strong sense of community, of a beautiful, meaningful shared purpose and heartfelt mutual support to help each other get there.
By the time we decided on the name Centre for Effective Altruism I had one of the fancy "director" titles (we students love our fancy titles) and was working on community support for Giving What We Can. When The Life You Can Save needed new leadership, I stepped up, and when my mental health deteriorated, I stepped down. I then spent three years in jobs in which my priorities were (i) my mental health and (ii) exploration of a large variety of industries and people. Then last summer I was able to take some months off to reevaluate and, feeling more mentally healthy and realising that I'd learnt relatively little of value in my three years "off", I decided to try EA community-building full-time again.
This is one version of my story. It's already a bit more exposure than I really feel comfortable with at the moment, so I've left out a lot of the embarrassing mistakes I made (nearly all around being too confident and/or emotional in my judgements) and a lot of the things I found difficult. But I hope that you find something useful in it, that you enjoy reflecting on your own story, and that you remember that we each have a story riddled with personal mistakes and challenges but united in one belief: Tomorrow can be brighter than today[2].
Final notes
Readers, please remember to keep in mind that these stories are not who we are. They are some of the places we have been and/or snapshots of where we happen to be today. And no doubt they contain many honest innaccuracies.
For anyone interested in more on this topic, see The Life You Can Save's Supporters Stories, Tom Ash's A taxonomy of EA origin stories, and some more from Origin Stories Month in January 2015. [Edit: Also on the related question of how people found one of the top sources of EA folk, the LessWrong survey (2014) lists referrals as follows: a link (464, 31%), Harry Potter and the Methods Of Rationality (385, 26%), Overcoming Bias (210, 14%), friend (199, 13%), search engine (114, 8%), other fiction (17, 1%).]
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[1]By "underrepresented groups" I mean "the collection of people who currently possess to a relatively high degree the kinds of skills, experiences, motivations, resources, mindsets, habits or other characteristics that you would like to see more of in the EA community". Maybe for you that includes demographics severely underrepresented in EA compared to the global population. Maybe it's "very high altruistic dedication" etc. Of course, qualitative origin stories are not the only way to collect relevant data on this.
[2]This post is not just about data collection; the timing is no coincidence. My hope is that this might also serve as a kind of "EA gratitude journalling" - that reflecting on your early days in EA and what you loved or grew to love about it will help generate positive feelings of nostalgia, appreciation and camaraderie. At the time of writing, I sense that tensions are particularly high in our community. I of course have my own thoughts on what mistakes particular people/organisations have made or are making, and on whose judgment or honesty I most trust on which matters, and I think it is often extremely important to discuss them. And often emotion is in the driving seat when I'm discussing my latest thoughts, despite my self-deception to the contrary, we're all human. But I suspect that an extra dose of empathy and mutual appreciation would be useful for the disagreements being aired right now and I hope that taking part in this exercise, even privately, will help. Almost no one is evil. Almost everything is broken.
I think this is a great idea, and I was really interested, and also touched, by the stories people have already posted, so thank you all! Holly, I love the sentiment of “an extra dose of empathy and mutual appreciation” – I feel like to some extent EA culture, or at least that of its online spaces like this one, is very good at hiding the many meaningful personal relationships that I know the community has fostered.
I found EA in late 2012, just after I’d started my first degree in Oxford. At the first meeting of the science fiction society (which I then never ended up going back to), someone pointed me towards HPMoR. I then looked it up when I got back to my room and read a bit of it, and then found someone talking about EA in the comments section. I never did read the rest of HPMoR until a long time later, and apart from that I’ve never interacted with the rationalist community, so I always feel like this origin story is amusingly mismatched to me... Anyway, I then read about EA a bit on the internet, generally thought it was a great idea, and it sat around in the back of my mind for a while. About a year later, I think, I started regular EA-guided donations.
I know for a fact that I’ve changed a whole lot in the last six years, which I’m happy about, because I really don’t like six-years-ago me. When I started university (studying physics) I was – not remotely to say that I think all of these things are bad, of course, only some of them – very analytical in my approach to most things. I was entirely emotionally inept – I didn’t really form emotional friendships (at least, not ones that were emotional from my side); I sometimes treated people rather badly, enough that I’m pretty surprised looking back that some of my friends stayed with me, and I just really didn’t understand most people’s emotional needs, which often led me to be very judgemental and superior, including on moral issues. I liked having very long, theoretical conversations with my fellow students late into the night (that hasn’t changed!), and I liked being reactionary and expressing opinions that were different enough to be shocking to others. Morally I think I was a pretty rigid deontologist.
(As a point of interest, for a while afterwards, I held a really weird position of just-about-moral-realism, where I thought that what was, universally and really, right and wrong for one person, might be entirely different for another in the same situation – I thought that real morality existed, but depended on the actor about whom the question was being asked as much as the action. I had this way of visualising it that was of there being a little “moral bubble universe” attached to each consciousness that was real, but that was only true for that one person, and each person had a moral sense pointing into that space, that could tell them only about what was right for them.)
Once I encountered EA (which was at the time when it seemed to almost entirely concern charitable donations), I did agree with it wholeheartedly; being good is good, and being better is better. But, to be uncharitable to my earlier self, I also liked it because it let me dissociate morality and caring, and because the analytical, counter-intuitive, and just plain unusual nature of it fit well with my, I suppose, aesthetics of ideas at the time.
I didn’t do a lot more with EA other than read about it and direct my donations, and donate increasing (but still small) amounts for a long while after. In 2015 I finished my physics degree and moved to Cambridge, to start a second undergraduate degree in medieval languages. I read a lot more about EA, on the internet and Doing Good Better once that came out, and also started donating more, and eventually took the Pledge last year. However I didn’t do anything with the Cambridge EA group other than go to one formal hall and hang about on their mailing list. Looking back, I think this was because my plan at the time was firmly to remain in academia in the humanities, and I think I had some guilt over the fact that as someone who felt like I knew a fair bit about EA by now, should probably be using it to direct my career, but didn’t want to and so felt vaguely uncomfortable (although of course I shouldn’t have) about the idea of mixing with lots of core EAs.
Compared to the me described above, by maybe two years ago, I’d changed a whole lot (fortunately) – I’d become actually vaguely emotionally capable, both in understanding others’ feelings and my own. I’ve been able to make a wonderful group of close emotional friendships, and I think (hope?) that I’ve become a much more pleasant person to know since I became able to care. While I certainly do still like to be analytical, and think things through properly (and this is a good thing), my opinions have mostly become a whole lot more mainstream and acceptable on many matters as I worked out that on thing after thing, the norms that society’s settled on are actually often pretty good to follow – I have also entirely changed on political opinions, from pretty rigidly conservative to pretty radically left-wing. I’m now certainly a consequentialist morally speaking, although I haven’t worked out precisely what kind yet. (Preference utilitarianism appeals the most to me, but doesn’t satisfy, and I’m nowhere near a satisfying position on population ethics.)
I definitely still fully identify with EA; in some ways it’s the most prominent belief that I feel I’ve actually stuck with, but my reasons for appreciating EA have definitely changed. Obviously a big part of it is still that EA is simply morally correct. However I feel now, if I may risk getting somewhat floaty, more like I’m an effective altruist because I care about people, because I feel like I’m part of a global community of humanity, and it’s tragic that there are so many people who suffer, people who are just like the friends I love in everything except that they were born in the wrong house; it’s tragic that we can’t help them all, and EA is important to me because tells me how we can make the world the biggest little bit less terrible that we can. I also love the idea of EA as a real community of people dedicated to doing good.
Soon after starting my masters course (still medieval languages) I realised I was much less certain about doing a PhD than I had thought, and didn’t apply for one, instead planning to take a year out and think about what I wanted to do. Since then, I had a bit of an EA renaissance (not that I’d particularly had an off period), started reading things a lot more, listening to the podcasts, went to a couple of EA Cambridge events, talked about things more with the one of my closest friends who is very involved in the Cambridge community. When I read the 80,000 Hours article about operations work, that really clicked with me as I didn’t feel most of the other direct work profiles had, and I ended up getting advice from a couple of CEA people, and now plan to work at something relevant for the next year while I’m committed to living in Cambridge with my friends here, then look for something directly effective after that.
Thank you also for posting something that I felt confident enough to reply to – I’ve been reading the forum for ages but never yet managed to comment on anything. Hopefully it will be easier now! And I'm sorry that this got a little long...