I'm interested in stories of people changing the way they interact with the EA movement/community, whether they've become more deeply involved or dialed down their involvement. This seems like a good way to understand what EA's "infrastructure" (organizations, communities, etc.) is doing well or badly.
Has your involvement changed in the last ~12 months? If so, what factors were important in that change?
Examples might include:
- Getting a new job in the community
- Attending your first conference
- Taking a pledge related to your giving
- Having a personal experience that made EA feel more meaningful or special to you
- Finding a new job/hobby/community outside of EA that led you to become less engaged
- Having an unpleasant interaction that made you feel somewhat alienated from EA
Thanks for sharing :)
Do you think you wouldn't have found it as negative/abrasive if the people still basically argued against a focus on those causes or an engagement with other advocacy orgs or the like, but did so in a way that felt less like a quick, pre-loaded answer, and more like they:
I ask because I think there'll be a near-inevitable tension at times between being welcoming to people's current cause prioritisation views and staying focused on what does seem most worth prioritising.[1] So perhaps the ideal would be a bit more genuine open-mindedness to alternative views, but mainly a more welcoming and less dismissive-seeming way of explaining "our" views. I'd hope that that would be sufficient to avoid seeming arrogant or abrasive or driving people away, but I don't know.
(Something else may instead be the ideal. This could include spending more time helping people think about the most effective approaches to causes that don't actually seem to be worth prioritising. But I suspect that that's not ideal in many cases.)
[1] I'm not sure this tension is strong for climate change, as I do think there are decent arguments for prioritising (neglected aspects of) climate change (e.g., nuclear power, research into low-probability extreme risks). But I think this tension probably exists for human rights advocacy and various other issues many people care about.