LESSWRONG
LW

All of DjangoCorte's Comments + Replies

2014 Survey of Effective Altruists
DjangoCorte40

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."

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2014 Survey of Effective Altruists
DjangoCorte30

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/

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7Drayin
lukeprog (Luke Muehlhauser) objects to CEA's claim that EA grew primarily out of Giving What We Can at http://www.effectivealtruism.org/#comments :
Negative and Positive Selection
DjangoCorte10

I'm not sure that it's the corporate structure that makes negative selection more useful in the data entry case. It's not the fact that the data-entry clerk is part of a large organisation that means that a slightly incompetent data-entry clerk is more disruptive than a genius-level one is helpful. Rather it's the fact that data-entry is a relatively low skill job and with relatively little room for excelling above mere competence. Leaving the corporation wholly out of it, and imagining a person doing data entry in complete isolation, the most helpful dat... (read more)

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0Ezekiel
The point I should have made clear was that data-entry clerks don't exist outside of corporations, because in isolation they're useless. More generally, mass production has been made possible by the production-line paradigm: break down the undertaking into tiny discrete jobs and assign a bunch of people to doing each one over and over again. Once you get that kind of framework, exceptionally good workers aren't very helpful, because the people to either side of them in the production line aren't necessarily going to keep up. You just need to shut up and do your job, the same as everyone else. At the high levels - the people wielding their collective underlings as a tool, rather than the people who are part of that tool - this obviously no longer works. Important note: all of the above, including my original comment, is 100% psuedo-intellectual wank, since I've never been part of a corporation, never taken a business management course or seminar, and never conducted or read a study on the efficacy of various business practices.