3) If you feel comfortable, make a habit of asking other EAs to explain how they picked their cause area, and invite them to try to convince you to change your mind, so they don't have to worry about being inappropriately aggressive towards people who don't want it.
I think I'm a bit averse to pushing this responsibility onto others ("convince me!") rather than putting in the effort myself to research/understand. But there is a lot of material out there related to each cause.
Rather than many-to-many requests (each person asking multiple others for their reasons), or as an adjunct to doing that, is there a consolidated guide to the key reasons for or against each of the main areas? I haven't come across one, but may have missed it. I've seen intros/summaries from different EA orgs, but they're generally not steelmanned / responding to the objections of the other cause-foci.
If this doesn't exist, it might be a good project in terms of time-saving and mind-change facilitation and feeling like one community whose members understand one other (a sort of "Ideological Turing Test Prep").
I don't like proposing projects without volunteering to help them, which is probably a fault of mine, but that said I'd be willing to help with this if people think it's a good idea. Asking individuals for their reasons, as Claire proposed, and then collecting/aggregating/summarizing responses might be a good place to start with such a thing, since few of us (none of us?) are expert in the various areas.
I think I'm a bit averse to pushing this responsibility onto others ("convince me!") rather than putting in the effort myself to research/understand. But there is a lot of material out there related to each cause.
Rather than many-to-many requests (each person asking multiple others for their reasons), or as an adjunct to doing that, is there a consolidated guide to the key reasons for or against each of the main areas? I haven't come across one, but may have missed it. I've seen intros/summaries from different EA orgs, but they're generally not steelmanned / responding to the objections of the other cause-foci.
If this doesn't exist, it might be a good project in terms of time-saving and mind-change facilitation and feeling like one community whose members understand one other (a sort of "Ideological Turing Test Prep").
I don't like proposing projects without volunteering to help them, which is probably a fault of mine, but that said I'd be willing to help with this if people think it's a good idea. Asking individuals for their reasons, as Claire proposed, and then collecting/aggregating/summarizing responses might be a good place to start with such a thing, since few of us (none of us?) are expert in the various areas.