Most Effective Altruists are still young and will have the greates impact with their careers (and spend the greatest amounts of money) in several decades. However, people also change a lot and for some this leads to a decrease of engagement or even full drop-out. Since there is evidence, that drop out rates might be up to 30% throughout the career of higly engaged EAs, this is some serious loss of high impact work and well directed money.
Ways of tackling this problem might include:
Introducing more formal commitment steps when getting into EA
Encouraging people to write down and reflect on their reasons for being part of EA
Creating events especially aimed at strengthening the core community and encouraging friendships
I find most discussion about discouraging value drift pretty distasteful. I don’t have any reason to believe my future self’s values will be worse than my current self’s, so I don’t want to be uncooperative with her or significantly constrain her options.
I’m especially uncomfortable with the implication that becoming less involved with EA means someone’s values have gotten worse.
What about the predictable effect of becomingless open-minded and tolerant as we age? Sure, there’s a sense in which I don’t know that that state is worse than my current one. But it seems worse, and that seems enough to worry about it.
Becoming less open-minded seems like a classic case of a healthy explore/exploit over a lifetime. I’m less open-minded about a lot of things than I was a decade ago and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I wouldn’t worry about a change of the same magnitude again over the next decade.
Edit: For me open-mindedness to isn’t a moral value, it’s just a means to an end. People who intrinsically value open-mindedness might be much more nervous about becoming less open-minded! That would be totally reasonable.
Edit 2: There’s something very ironic about using “older people become less open-minded” as a rationale for “I should commit myself to one social movement for the rest of my life”.
We may be talking past each other, because what I mean by open-mindedness I mean seems extremely instrumentally valuable on all kinds of views:
If I become less impartial, less open to evidence, and less willing to adapt to good changes in the world, this ought to concern me.
(I actually don’t know how reliable the above results about old-age conservatism are, so discount the above to the extent you don’t trust those studies.)
@ Edit 2: I’m not OP and don’t intend this as an argument for committing to EA 4eva. Instead it’s an example of value drift which concerns me, independent of where the social movement lands.
Prevent community drainage due to value drift
Effective Altruism, Movement building
Most Effective Altruists are still young and will have the greates impact with their careers (and spend the greatest amounts of money) in several decades. However, people also change a lot and for some this leads to a decrease of engagement or even full drop-out. Since there is evidence, that drop out rates might be up to 30% throughout the career of higly engaged EAs, this is some serious loss of high impact work and well directed money.
Ways of tackling this problem might include:
Introducing more formal commitment steps when getting into EA
Encouraging people to write down and reflect on their reasons for being part of EA
Creating events especially aimed at strengthening the core community and encouraging friendships
I find most discussion about discouraging value drift pretty distasteful. I don’t have any reason to believe my future self’s values will be worse than my current self’s, so I don’t want to be uncooperative with her or significantly constrain her options.
I’m especially uncomfortable with the implication that becoming less involved with EA means someone’s values have gotten worse.
What about the predictable effect of becoming less open-minded and tolerant as we age? Sure, there’s a sense in which I don’t know that that state is worse than my current one. But it seems worse, and that seems enough to worry about it.
Becoming less open-minded seems like a classic case of a healthy explore/exploit over a lifetime. I’m less open-minded about a lot of things than I was a decade ago and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I wouldn’t worry about a change of the same magnitude again over the next decade.
Edit: For me open-mindedness to isn’t a moral value, it’s just a means to an end. People who intrinsically value open-mindedness might be much more nervous about becoming less open-minded! That would be totally reasonable.
Edit 2: There’s something very ironic about using “older people become less open-minded” as a rationale for “I should commit myself to one social movement for the rest of my life”.
We may be talking past each other, because what I mean by open-mindedness I mean seems extremely instrumentally valuable on all kinds of views:
If I become less impartial, less open to evidence, and less willing to adapt to good changes in the world, this ought to concern me.
(I actually don’t know how reliable the above results about old-age conservatism are, so discount the above to the extent you don’t trust those studies.)
@ Edit 2: I’m not OP and don’t intend this as an argument for committing to EA 4eva. Instead it’s an example of value drift which concerns me, independent of where the social movement lands.