Some of what long-time EAs might have to offer (possibly but not necessarily including you) is:

• perspective on what has and hasn't worked well for EA in the past
• general maturity and accumulated experience that can help you mentor EAs who might want help with general life skills or general professional skills
• a sense of gravitas and reliability that could suit you for joining a board of directors or board of advisors or otherwise representing EA to the outside world.

I fear we have yet to truly refute Robin Hanson’s claim that EA is primarily a youth movement.

Wow. This is my first time reading that Robin Hanson blog post from 2015. 

When I was around 18 to 20 or 21, I was swept up in political radicalism, and then I became a pretty strong skeptic of political radicalism afterward — although it always bears mentioning that such things are too complex to cram into an either/or binary and the only way to do them justice is try to sort the good from the bad.

I think largely because of this experience I was pretty skeptical of radicalism in EA when I got involved with my university EA group from around age 23 to 25 or 26. I don't like it when ideas become hungry and try to take over everything. Going from a view on charity effectiveness and our moral obligation to donate 10% of our income to charity to a worldview that encompassed more and more and more was never a move I supported or felt comfortable with.^[1]

It has always seemed to me that the more EA tried to stretch beyond its original scope of charity effectiveness and an obligation to give, which Peter Singer articulated in The Life You Can Save in 2009,^[2] the more it was either endorsing dubious, poorly-supported conclusions or trying to reinvent the wheel from first principles for no particularly good reason. 

I think this paragraph from Hanson's blog post is devastatingly accurate:

Some observers see effective altruism as being about using formal statistics or applying consensus scientific theories. But in fact effective altruists embrace contrarian concerns about AI “foom” (discussed often on this blog), concerns based neither on formal statistics nor on applying consensus theories. Instead this community just trusts its own judgment on what reasoning is “careful,” without worrying much if outsiders disagree. This community has a strong overlap with a “rationalist” community wherein people take classes on and much discuss how to be “rational”, and then decide that they have achieved enough rationality to justify embracing many quite contrarian conclusions.

If you think that effective altruism has discovered or invented radically novel and radically superior general-purpose principles for how to think, live, be rational, or be moral, I'm sorry, but that's ludicrous. EA is a mish-mash of ideas from analytic moral philosophy, international development, public health, a bit of economics and finance, and a bit of few other things. That's all. 

I think the trajectory that is healthy is when people who have strong conviction in EA start with a radical critique of the status quo (e.g. a lot of things like cancer research or art or politics or volunteering with lonely seniors seem a lot less effective than GiveWell charities or the like, so we should scorn them), then see the rationales for the status quo (e.g. ultimately, society would start to fall apart if tried to divert too many resources to GiveWell charities and the like by taking them away from everything else), and then come full circle back around to some less radical position (e.g. as many people as possible should donate 10-20% of their income to effective charities, and some people should try to work directly in high-priority cause areas). 

This healthy trajectory is what I thought of when Hanson said that youth movements eventually "moderate their positions" and "become willing to compromise".

I think the trajectory that is unhealthy is when people repudiate the status quo in some overall sense, seemingly often at least partially because it fills certain emotional needs to make the world other than oneself and to condemn its wicked ways. 

Many (though not all) effective altruists seem content to accept the consensus view on most topics, to more or less trust people in general, to trust most mainstream institutions like academia, journalism, and the civil service (of liberal democratic countries), and they don't particularly seek out being contrarian or radical or to reject the world. 

On the other hand, this impulse to reject the world and be other than it is probably the central impulse that characterizes LessWrong and the rationalist community. EA/rationalist blogosphere writer Ozy Brennan wrote an insightful blog post about rationalists and the "cultic milieu", a concept from sociology that refers to new religious movements rather than the high-control groups we typically think of when we think of "cults". (Read the post if you want more context.) They wrote:

People become rationalists because they are attracted to the cultic milieu—that is, people who distrust authority and want to figure things out for themselves and like knowing secrets that no one else knows. People who are attracted to the cultic milieu are attracted to stigmatized knowledge whether or not it is in fact correct.

In a similar vein, the EA Forum member Maniano wrote a post where they conveyed their impression of EAs and rationalists (abbreviating "rationalists" to "rats", as is not uncommon for rationalists to do):

If I’d have to vaguely point to a specific difference in the vibes of an EAs and those of rats, I would say EAs feel more innocent whereas rats might, with possibly a little bit too much generalization, feel like they’d rank higher in some dark triad traits and feature more of chuunibyou tendencies sprinkled with a dash of narrative addiction.

I don't know for sure what "narrative addiction" means, but I suspect what the author meant is something similar to the sort of psychological tendencies Ozy Brennan described in the post about the cultic milieu. Namely, the same sort of tendency often seen among people who buy into conspiracy theories or the paranoid style in politics to think about the world narratively rather than causally, to favour narratively compelling accounts of events (especially those containing intrigue, secrets, betrayal, and danger) rather than awkward, clunky, uncertain, confusing, and narratively unsatisfying accounts of events.

From the linked Wikipedia article:

Chūnibyō (中二病; lit. 'middle-school second-year syndrome') is a Japanese colloquial term typically used to describe adolescents with delusions of grandeur. These teenagers are thought to desperately want to stand out and convince themselves that they have hidden knowledge or secret powers. It is sometimes called "eighth-grader syndrome" in the United States, usually in the context of localizations of anime which feature the concept as a significant plot element.

I think seeing oneself as other than the wicked world is not a tendency that is inherent to effective altruism or a necessary part of the package. But it is a fundamental part of rationalism. Similarly, EA can be kept safely in one corner of your life, even as some people might try to convince you it needs to eat more of your life. But it seems like the whole idea of rationalism is that it takes over. The whole idea is that it's a radical new way to think, live, be rational, and be moral and/or successful.

I wonder if the kind of boredom you described, Michael, that might eventually set in from a simpler The Life You Can Save-style effective altruism is part of what has motivated people to seek a more expansive (and eventually maybe even totalizing) version of effective altruism — because that bigger version is more exciting (even if it's wrong, and even if it's wrong and harmful).

Personally, I would love to be involved in a version of effective altruism that felt more like a wholesome, warm, inclusive liberal church with an emphasis on community, social ties, and participation. (Come to think of it, one of the main people at the university EA group I was involved in said he learned how to be warm and welcoming to people through church. And he was good at it!) I am not really interested in the postmodernist cyberpunk novel version of effective altruism, which is cold, mean, and unhappy.

1. ^{^}

   I think we should be willing to entertain radical ideas but have a very high bar for accepting them, noting that many ideas considered foundational today were once radical, but also noting that most radical ideas are wrong and some can lead to dangerous or harmful consequences. 
   
   Another thing to consider is how hungry these ideas are, as I mentioned. Some radical ideas have a limited scope of application. For example, polyamory is a radical idea for romantic relationships, but it only affects your romantic relationships. Polyamory doesn't tell you to quit your current job and find a new job where you convince monogamous people to become polyamorous. Or provide services to people who are already polyamorous. Polyamory doesn't tell you to have any particular opinions about politics — besides maybe narrow things like rights (e.g. hospital visitation rights) for people in polyamorous relationships — or technology or culture or the fate of the world. 
   
   When radical ideas become totalizing and want to be the axis around which the world turns, that's when I start to feel alarmed.

2. ^{^}

   The Life You Can Save is an example of a radical idea — one I think we should accept — that, similar to polyamory, may affect our lives in a significant way, but is naturally limited in scope. The Life You Can Save is an expression of a simple and straightforward version of effective altruism. As people have wanted the scope of effective altruism to get larger and larger over time, that has led to the accretion of a more complicated and eclectic version of effective altruism that I think is a lot more dubious.