Are older people overlooked within EA? If so, how should we change that?

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.”

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.

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.

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