Karolina is Co-founder and Co-Executive Director at Charity Entrepreneurship. She also serves as a Fund Manager at the EA Animal Welfare Fund, and as a board member and consultant for various EA nonprofits and think tanks.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karolinasarek/
Thank you, Joey, for gathering those data. And thank you, Darius, for providing us with the suggestions for reducing this risk. I agree that further research on causes of value drift and how to avoid it is needed. If the phenomenon is explained correctly, that could be a great asset to the EA community building. But regardless of this explanation, your suggestions are valuable.
It seems to be a generally complex problem because retention encapsulates the phenomenon in which a person develops an identity, skill set, and consistent motivation or dedication to significantly change the course of their life. CEA in their recent model of community building framed it as resources, dedication, and realization.
Decreasing retention is also observed in many social movements. Some insights about how it happens can be culled from sociological literature. Although it is still underexplored and the sociological analysis might have mediocre quality, but it might still be useful to have a look at it. For example, this analysis implicate that “movement’s ability to sustain itself is a deeply interactive question predicted by its relationship to its participants: their availability, their relationships to others, and the organization’s capacity to make them feel empowered, obligated, and invested.”
Additional aspects of value drift to consider on an individual level that might not be relevant to other social movements: mental health and well-being, pathological altruism, purchasing fuzzies and utilons separately.
The reasons for the value drift from EA seems to be as important in understanding the process, as the value drift that led to EA, e.g. In Joey’s post, he gave an illustrative story of Alice. What could explain her value drift was the fact that at people during their first year of college are more prone to social pressure and need for belonging. That could make her become EA and drifted when she left college and her EA peers. So “Surround yourself with value aligned people” for the whole course of your life. That also stresses the importance of untapped potential of local groups outside the main EA hubs. For this reason, it’s worth considering even If in case of outreach we shouldn’t rush to translate effective altruism
About the data itself. We might be making wrong inferences trying to explain those date. Because it shows only a fraction of the process and maybe if we would observe the curve of engagement it would fluctuate over a longer period of time, eg. 50% in the first 2-5 year, 10% in a 6th year, 1% in for the next 2-3 and then coming back to 10%, 50% etc.? Me might hypothesize that life situation influence the baseline engagement for short period (1 month- 3 years). As analogous for changes in a baseline of happiness and influences of live events explained by hedonic adaptation, maybe we have sth like altruistic adaptation, that changes after a significant live event (changing the city, marriage etc.) and then comes back to baseline.
Additionally, the level of engagement in EA and other significant variables does not correlate perfectly, the data could also be explained by the regression to the mean. If some of the EAs were hardcore at the beginning, they will tend to be closer to the average on a second measurement, so from 50% to 10%, and those from 10% to 1%. Anyhow, the likelihood that the value drift is true is higher than that it’s not.
More could be done about the vale drift on the structural level, e.g. it might be also explained by the main bottlenecks in the community itself, like the Mid-Tire Trap (e.g. too good for running local group, but no good enough to be hired by main EA organizations → multiple unsuccessful job applications → frustration → drop out).
Becuase mechanism of the value drift would determine the strategies to minimalize risk or harm of it and because the EA community might not be representative for other social movements, we should systematically and empirically explore those and other factors in order to find the 80⁄20 of long-lasting commitment.