Yes, older people are somewhat overlooked. While there are some efforts to reach out to specific older individuals or to certain types/categories of older people (such as very high net worth individuals or family offices), in general people who discover EA after university are discovering EA ‘on their own,’ not through the types of more formalized ‘recruitment efforts’ that happen at some universities. I do think that there is a lot of experience and knowledge that we are missing out on.
While I do see the downsides of this, I don’t necessarily think that it is the wrong choice. It might be; I’m not sure. Setting aside by own biases in favor of older people, a few things strike me as pragmatic reasons to deprioritize/overlook older people to some extent.[1]
Much like habits and identities in other areas of life, it is simply harder to convince older people to join something new. (This is a generalization, of course)
Older people tend to have more commitments. Family and career can easily prevent someone from attending events, volunteering, taking a week off to attend a conference, doing a multi-hour work sample test, etc.
Older people tend to be less geographically/institutionally concentrated in a single location than younger people. In my mind, this is the most important. If you want to get the word out to 18-to-22-year-olds in any particular city (in the USA at least), you can put up a dozen posters and share an image in a dozen chat groups, and a decent percent of your target audience will see your message. If I pick a different age range, say 58-to 62-year-olds, I think that it would take a lot more effort to each the same percent of that population.[2] How many places would you have to put up posters or share images?
So while I don’t like it very much, I do think there are pretty understandable factors that make this a reasonable decision. But if you could get a GWWC style advertisement in the AARP magazine to convince senior citizens to funnel their charity dollars toward more impactful charity and to spend some of their free time mentoring junior people, I’d be a fan. I’d love to see EA meetups where most of the people are ages 30 to 60, and where we can all be at home in in bed before 10pm.[3]
Although we could certainly discuss to what extend would be ideal. Maybe devoting 30% of community building efforts/resources to older wouldn’t be a good choice, but what about 0.5%, or what about 3%? I don’t have an answer for this. I haven’t done the thinking nor the number crunching to figure out what makes sense.
I think of paved roads as an analogy: my grandparents lived in a rural area with no paved roads. The road they lived on was dirt and gravel. They got electricity and plumbing later than most other places, too. The local government decided it simply wasn’t worth it to spend all that money and effort to pave one or two miles of road for so few people. Those resources could be better spent elsewhere.
Thanks for your perspective! Yes for being home in bed by 10 PM, haha! I’d still love to find the exceptions to your (justified) generalizations on old people, so if you’d like, I can keep you in the loop on possible developments surrounding my experiment/test run.
Yes, older people are somewhat overlooked. While there are some efforts to reach out to specific older individuals or to certain types/categories of older people (such as very high net worth individuals or family offices), in general people who discover EA after university are discovering EA ‘on their own,’ not through the types of more formalized ‘recruitment efforts’ that happen at some universities. I do think that there is a lot of experience and knowledge that we are missing out on.
While I do see the downsides of this, I don’t necessarily think that it is the wrong choice. It might be; I’m not sure. Setting aside by own biases in favor of older people, a few things strike me as pragmatic reasons to deprioritize/overlook older people to some extent.[1]
Much like habits and identities in other areas of life, it is simply harder to convince older people to join something new. (This is a generalization, of course)
Older people tend to have more commitments. Family and career can easily prevent someone from attending events, volunteering, taking a week off to attend a conference, doing a multi-hour work sample test, etc.
Older people tend to be less geographically/institutionally concentrated in a single location than younger people. In my mind, this is the most important. If you want to get the word out to 18-to-22-year-olds in any particular city (in the USA at least), you can put up a dozen posters and share an image in a dozen chat groups, and a decent percent of your target audience will see your message. If I pick a different age range, say 58-to 62-year-olds, I think that it would take a lot more effort to each the same percent of that population.[2] How many places would you have to put up posters or share images?
So while I don’t like it very much, I do think there are pretty understandable factors that make this a reasonable decision. But if you could get a GWWC style advertisement in the AARP magazine to convince senior citizens to funnel their charity dollars toward more impactful charity and to spend some of their free time mentoring junior people, I’d be a fan. I’d love to see EA meetups where most of the people are ages 30 to 60, and where we can all be at home in in bed before 10pm.[3]
Although we could certainly discuss to what extend would be ideal. Maybe devoting 30% of community building efforts/resources to older wouldn’t be a good choice, but what about 0.5%, or what about 3%? I don’t have an answer for this. I haven’t done the thinking nor the number crunching to figure out what makes sense.
I think of paved roads as an analogy: my grandparents lived in a rural area with no paved roads. The road they lived on was dirt and gravel. They got electricity and plumbing later than most other places, too. The local government decided it simply wasn’t worth it to spend all that money and effort to pave one or two miles of road for so few people. Those resources could be better spent elsewhere.
For anyone not familiar, there is a stereotype/cliché of older people going to sleep early, and I’m sort of teasing about that.
If anyone has good ideas to share EA ideas with an older crowd, I’d be happy to contribute in some way.
Thanks for your perspective! Yes for being home in bed by 10 PM, haha! I’d still love to find the exceptions to your (justified) generalizations on old people, so if you’d like, I can keep you in the loop on possible developments surrounding my experiment/test run.