This is the key question and more research is needed.
Generally, my guess is that in most cases the answer is very mundane: people’s careers change, they graduate college and are no longer involved with other EAs, they get busier and don’t have time for EA engagement anymore, they have a kid and focus on raising them, they move towns and get involved with something else, and/or people’s fascinations just change even with no life changes, etc… it is easy to identify in a movement and then drift out to something else. For one anecdotal example, in 2009-2011 I strongly identified with the atheist movement but then drifted out due to an increasing lack of interest (and a newfound interest in EA).
It might be possible to use the email method to identify particular people who do not return and see how they compare to the population that does return, but I am nervous that these populations are just hopelessly confounded by people changing email addresses or general noise with small samples.
Insofar as we can, we could also try to ask people who don’t come back for their reasons, but these people by definition are hard to contact (since they left) and sampling will be likely biased. I know EA London made one attempt to do something like this but it felt fairly inconclusive.
Peter, when you drifted away from the atheist movement, do you feel like your values and beliefs changed, or was it more about unsubscribing from newsletters and prioritizing different blogs and events?
I can’t speak for Peter, but I also drifted away from caring much about atheism/humanism. In my case, I found that EA gave me all the rationality and caring-about-people that I’d been looking for, without the discussion of religion or focus on religion-related issues (which often felt repetitive or low-impact). My values and beliefs didn’t change; I just found a better way to fulfill them.
This raises a question: Is there something EA gave some of the people who left, which they then found more of in some other place?
This is the key question and more research is needed.
Generally, my guess is that in most cases the answer is very mundane: people’s careers change, they graduate college and are no longer involved with other EAs, they get busier and don’t have time for EA engagement anymore, they have a kid and focus on raising them, they move towns and get involved with something else, and/or people’s fascinations just change even with no life changes, etc… it is easy to identify in a movement and then drift out to something else. For one anecdotal example, in 2009-2011 I strongly identified with the atheist movement but then drifted out due to an increasing lack of interest (and a newfound interest in EA).
It might be possible to use the email method to identify particular people who do not return and see how they compare to the population that does return, but I am nervous that these populations are just hopelessly confounded by people changing email addresses or general noise with small samples.
Insofar as we can, we could also try to ask people who don’t come back for their reasons, but these people by definition are hard to contact (since they left) and sampling will be likely biased. I know EA London made one attempt to do something like this but it felt fairly inconclusive.
Peter, when you drifted away from the atheist movement, do you feel like your values and beliefs changed, or was it more about unsubscribing from newsletters and prioritizing different blogs and events?
I feel like my values and beliefs changed to some extent. I no longer feel like reducing the influence of religion is an important thing to do.
I can’t speak for Peter, but I also drifted away from caring much about atheism/humanism. In my case, I found that EA gave me all the rationality and caring-about-people that I’d been looking for, without the discussion of religion or focus on religion-related issues (which often felt repetitive or low-impact). My values and beliefs didn’t change; I just found a better way to fulfill them.
This raises a question: Is there something EA gave some of the people who left, which they then found more of in some other place?
Point of clarification: Those focus groups were specifically focused on people who do attend events, not people who left.