lukeprog (Luke Muehlhauser) objects to CEA’s claim that EA grew primarily out of Giving What We Can at http://www.effectivealtruism.org/#comments :
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.
“Why haven’t more EAs signed up for a course on global security, or tried to understand how DARPA funds projects, or learned about third-world health? I’ve heard claims that this would be too time-consuming relative to the value it provides, but this seems like a poor excuse. If we want to be taken seriously as a movement (or even just want to reach consistently accurate conclusions about the world).”
This one worries me quite a bit. The vast majority of EA’s (including myself) have not spent very much time learning about what the large players in third world poverty are (e.g. WHO, UN). In fact you can be an “expert” in EA content and know virtually nothing about the rest of the non-profit/charity sector.