I am a bit nervous to actually post something on this forum (although it is just a simple question, not really an opinion or an analysis).
Context
I have been engaging with EA content for a while now, read most of the foundational posts and the handbook, and been at several in-person events, started donating and taking EA considerations into account for my future career choices. I have been completely and utterly convinced by the principles of EA very early on. However, I also happen to almost perfectly fit the stereotype of people who join EA the way I did: white male, medium-length hair, groomed beard, academic background with a side of tech skills, ambition... (At least that's what many EA people look like in France. To quote my girlfriend glancing over my shoulder as I started a Zoom meeting: "Oh, five copies of you"). I could not help but wonder why so many people with whom I shared the same initial motivations and ideas failed to stick around. I asked around and tried to reach out both to highly invested people and to people who left or kept some distance with the community. One of the big reasons was a disagreement about the "conclusions" offered by the community (the choice of causes, as well as the dismissal of some topics that were important to the newcomers).
Issue
Here is the object of my question: people agreeing with EA's principles genuinely think that it is important to lay out carefully what's important and relevant, to evaluate what we think should be prioritized, and then act upon it. However, people who actually take the time to do this process are very rare... Most of the people I know discovered the principles, started the reasoning process, and ended up convinced that they would reach the same conclusion as the community in a kind of "yeah that seems right"-cognitive-load-saving process.
Question
It seems to me that people who do not think that EA principles "seem right" from the beginning will face a much harder time being included in the community. I do think that individual people do respect the time it takes to integrate new knowledge and shift one's beliefs. However some communication does not happen in 1-1 or informal chats, but goes through the choice of curated content on this forum, through the responses that are sometimes tougher than they ought to be, especially on questions that approach the thin line between people who genuinely want to understand and people criticizing EA blindly, and through implicit appearances such as the relative uniformity of the backgrounds people come from. As a result, I wonder if EA as a group does not appear way more object-level focused than we may want it to, for people who are not yet convinced that the principles would lead them to the same object-level conclusions. If I had to sum up in one question: Do we, as a community, sometimes lean more toward unconsciously advocating specific outcomes rather than encouraging people to discover their own conclusions through the EA framework?
(Feel free to tackle and challenge every aspect of the question, context, or my views, form and content! Please be gentler if you want to criticize the motivation, or the person who posted :) As stated above, I hesitated for a long time before gathering enough courage to post for the first time.)
Re: agency of the community itself, I've been trying to get to this "pure" form of EA in my university group, and to be honest, it felt extremely hard.
-People who want to learn about EA often feel confused and suspicious until you get to object-level examples. "Ok, impactful career, but concretely, where would that get me? Can you give me an example?". I've faced real resistance when trying to stay abstract.
-It's hard to keep people's attention without talking about object-level examples, be it for teaching abstract concepts. It's even harder once you get to the "projects" phase of the year.
-People anchor hard on some specific object-level examples after that. "Oh, EA ? The malaria thing?" (Despite my go-to examples included things as diverse as shrimp welfare and pandemic preparedness)
-When it's not an object-level example, it's usually "utilitarianism" or "Peter Singer", which act a lot as thought stoppers and have an "eek" vibe for many people.
-People who care about non-typical causes actually have a hard time finding data and making estimates.
-In addition to that, agency for really making estimates is hard to build up. One member I knew thought the most Impactful career choice he had was potentially working on nuclear fusion. I suggested him to find out about the Impact-Tractability-Neglectedness of it to compare to another option he had (even rough OOMs) as well as more traditional ones. I can't remember him giving any numbers even months later. When he just mentioned he felt sure about the difference, I didn't feel comfortable arguing about the robustness of his justification. It's a tough balance to strike between respecting preferences and probing reasons.
-A lot of it comes down to career 1:1s. Completing the ~8 or so parts is already demanding. You have to provide estimates that are nowhere to be found if your center of interest is "niche" in EA. You then have to find academic and professional opportunities as well as relations that are not referenced anywhere in the EA community (I had to reach back to the big brother of a primary school friend I had lost track of to get a fusion engineer he could talk to!). If you need funding, even if your idea is promising, you need excellent communication skills for writing a convincing blog post, plausibly enough research skills to get non-air-plucked estimates for ITN / cost-effectiveness analysis, and a desire to go to EAGs and convince people who could just not care. Moreover a lot of people expressly limit themselves to their own country or continent. It's often easier to stick to the usual topics (I get call for applications for AIS fellowships almost every months, of course I never had ones about niche topics)
-Another point about career 1:1s, the initial list of options to compare is hard to negotiate. Some people will neglect non-EA options, others will neglect EA options, and I had issues with artificially adding options to help them truly compare options.
-Another other point, some people barely have the time to come to a few sessions. It's hard to get them to actually rely on the methodological tools they haven't learned about in order to compare their options during career 1:1s.
-A good way to cope with all of this is to encourage students to start things out -to create an org rather than joining one. But not everyone has the necessary motivation for this.
I'm still happy with having started the year with epistemics, rationality, ethics and meta-ethics, and to have done other sessions on intervention and policy evaluation, suffering and consciousness, and population ethics. I didn't desperately need to have sessions on GHD / Animal Welfare/ AI Safety, thought they're definitely "in demand".