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It seems to me that younger people/students (<40 years) are overrepresented in EA circles. Older people (40 and over) may be overlooked. Is this true? If so, how can this be changed?

My assumption is that there may be a significant untapped potential for positive impact within/from the more senior (possibly especially near-retirement age and over) segments of the population of the Netherlands, where I am based, but elsewhere in the world, too. For instance in the form of: 

  • A group of people with great expertise, who would like to remain active post-retirement, and who desire to make a positive impact. These people could be great mentors, helpers, or even initiators of new, effective, impactful organizations; possible new career EAs. 
  • A possible surplus of funds/means/time held onto by people who may be willing to donate to causes if the causes are deemed worthy, i.e. effective; they are possible new donors.

Would you say assumptions are right or wrong? Why? How should I go about testing them? If my assumptions are correct, is it possible to reach these people, for instance through intro courses or workshops? Have other people played with this idea before? Questions have been asked in a similar thinking direction, yet they have not entirely touched upon this. 

For a possible experiment, I would let myself be inspired by the work that CEA, GWWC, and the Tien Procent Club have done. My working title for this is Senior Impact Society. I would love to hear your opinion on this! 

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Yes, this is a problem, and a long-standing one at that. 

One of the more obvious areas for improvement would be for CEA to stop explicitly deprioritizing mid/late career professionals: 

“As mentioned in our 2021 plans, we intend to focus our efforts to bring new people into the community on students (especially at top universities) and young professionals. We intend to work to retain mid- and late-career professionals who are already highly engaged in EA, but we do not plan to work to recruit more mid- or late-career people.”

I agree - why state explicitly that you aren't recruiting mid or late career people? 

Even if its not your priority, why not say something like "we intend to focus our efforts to bring new people into the community on students (especially at top universities) and young professionals. At the same time we will encourage people of all ages and backgrounds to join the community while offering targeted support to some high impact opportunities to get experienced mid/late career professionals on board"

Or something.

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Ruben Dieleman 🔸
Yep, in agreement with this. Wondering if anything about these plans has changed for CEA since 2021, even if it's just behind the screens.

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]

  1. ^

    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.

  2. ^

    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.

  3. ^

    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. 

1
Ruben Dieleman 🔸
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.

This is true, and in our EA group, we are establishing an outreach model to attract them. So far here's why they don't get involved:

  • Mood at EA event is very young and excited, and connecting is harder for older people since they have different interests/lifestyles (not everyone can 'optimize' each step of their lives when they have kids and such). Communication norms are also different.
  • Career opportunities are much harder to find and grasp for experienced people: it's not as easy to go three months do a fellowship somewhere and leave your family behind, or change countries to find the perfect job because there are few effective opportunities in your country. We're improving that by working on a mapping of EA-likeminded institutions, but it's nascent work, not that supported by 80k. 
  • Many feel that their experience isn't valued and appreciated by EA members, when it's often a contest of who has read this and that but not so much learning from experienced members. 

    So yeah, as long as EA won't have a clear strategy of cooperation with other institutions (for example, the UN is often discarded efficiency-wise, but no good research proves this!), and as long as behavioural norms won't change, it"s going to be hard. We trying to reach a tipping point of 25% of experienced people for the mood to change, but it's hard.

Interesting to read! What is your EA group called? And what constitutes the "experienced people" you mention - do you use some kind of benchmark or criterium?

  1. Fair to point out that the mood ("vibes") and communication norms should be adjusted in order to accommodate older people.
  2. I'd love to see the result of your mapping efforts!
  3. Yeah, it's exactly this that I'd like to change - for making impact to become more accessible.

Existing secular/humanist/freethought/agnostic/atheist/Unitarian Universalist/vegan/service clubs (rotary, lions, etc)/etc groups seem more diverse age wise and likely sympathetic audiences

Except for service clubs and humanist societies, I am not sure if I'd immediately agree. And even those groups may be less prone to sympathy towards EA ideas. Where or how did you gain your observations?

1
Pat Myron 🔸
I don't mean most members would be interested, but I think they'd at least listen to the pitch. Just thinking similar/tangential existing organized groups seem underutilized when growing new groups
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