In general, EA emerged as the convergence from 2008 to 2012 at least 4 distinct but overlapping proto-EA communities, in order of founding:
The Singularity Institute (now known as Machine Intelligence Research Institute; MIRI) and the “rationalist” discussion forum LessWrong, founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky and others in 2000 and 2006
GiveWell, founded by Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld in 2007, and Good Ventures, founded by with Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna in 2011, which partnered together in 2014 as GiveWell Labs (now Open Philanthropy)
Felicifia, created by Seth Baum, Ryan Carey, and Sasha Cooper in 2008 as a utilitarianism discussion forum, which is how I got involved as discussed above; these discussions largely moved to other venues such as Facebook in 2012, and Felicifia is no longer active.
Giving What We Can (2009) and 80,000 Hours (2011), founded by Will MacAskill and Toby Ord, philosophers at the University of Oxford, and the umbrella organization Centre for Effective Altruism; Will has written about the early history of EA on the TLYCS blog and the history of the term on the Effective Altruism Forum.
As the EA flag was being planted, there were many effectiveness-focused altruists who came out of the woodwork but did not have formal involvement with one of these 4 groups, especially people inspired by the famous philosopher and utilitarian Peter Singer, particularly his essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (1972)3 and book Animal Liberation (1975). Many were also involved in the evidence-based “randomista” movement in economic development, emphasizing evidence-based strategies to help the world’s poorest people, including academic research on this topic since the 1990s, especially IPA (2002) and JPAL (2003). Additionally, there were other email lists and community forms related to EA such as SL4 on the possibility of a technological singularity, as well as personal blogs, such as Brian Tomasik’s. Some were inspired by famous altruists such as Zell Kravinsky. I met many people in the early days of EA who said they had been thinking along EA lines for years and were so thrilled to find a community centered on this mindset. This is less common in 2022 because the movement is so visible and established that people run across it quickly once they start thinking in these ways.
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. …
And then the vote came down to this shortlist (emphasis mine):
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
… 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. …
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!
To add to your point, Jacy Reese Anthis in Some Early History of Effective Altruism wrote
On the history of the term “effective altruism”, Will MacAskill in 2014 dug through old emails and came up with the following stylised summary:
And then the vote came down to this shortlist (emphasis mine):
So predictably you have folks arguing e.g. Effective altruism is no longer the right name for the movement and so on.