The community's conception of value drifting is sometimes too narrow

I think that what is causing some confusion here is that "value drift" is (probably?) a loanword from AI-alignment which (I assume?) originally referred to very fundamental changes in goals that would unintentionally occur within iterative versions of self improving intelligences, which...isn't really something that humans do. The EA community borrowed this sort of scary alien term and is using it to describe a normal human thing that most people would ordinarily just call "changing priorities".

A common sense way to say this is that you might start out with great intentions, your priorities end up changing, and then your best intentions never come to life. It's not that different from when you meant to go to the gym every morning...but then a phone call came, and then you had to go to work, and now you are tired and sitting on the couch watching television instead.

Logistically, it might make sense to do the phone call now and the gym later. The question is: "Will you actually go to the gym later?" If your plan involves going later, are you actually going to go? And if not, maybe you should reschedule this call and just going to the gym now. I don't see it as a micro death that you were hoping to go to the gym but did not, it's that over the day other priorities took precedence and then you became too tired. You're still the same person who wanted to go... you just ...didn't go. Being the person who goes to the gym requires building a habit and reinforcing the commitment, so if you want to go then you should keep track of which behaviors cause you to actually go and which behaviors break the habit and lead to not going.

Similarly you should track "did you actually help others? And if your plan involves waiting for a decade ...are you actually going to do it then? Or is life going to have other plans?" That's why the research on this does (and ought to) focus on things like "are donations happening", "is direct work getting done" and so on. Because that's what is practically important if your goal is to help others. You might argue for yourself "it's really ok, I really will help others later in life" or you might argue "what if I care about some stuff more than helping others" and so on, but I think someone who is in the position of attempting to effectively help others in part through the work of other people (whether through donations or career or otherwise) over the course of decades should to some degree consider what usually happens to people's priorities in aggregate when modeling courses of action.

The main intervention they care about to reduce drifting towards non-altruism is increasing involvement with the Effective Altruism community. I’ve not seen any justification for focusing (exclusively) on that.

The first point I'd make here is that I'd guess people writing on these topics aren't necessarily primarily focused on a single dimension from more to less altruism. Instead, I'd guess they see the package of values and ideas associated with EA as being particularly useful and particularly likely to increase how much positive impact someone has. To illustrate, I'd rather have someone donating 5% of their income to any of the EA Funds than donating 10% of their income to a guide dog charity, even if the latter person may be "more altruistic". 

I don't think EA is the only package of values and ideas that can cause someone to be quite impactful, but it does seem an unusually good and reliable package. 

Relatedly, I care a lot less about drifts away from altruism among people who aren't likely to be very effectively altruistic anyway than among people who are. 

So if I'm more concerned about drift away from an EA-ish package of values than just away from altruism, and if I'm more concerned about drift away from altruism among relatively effectiveness-minded people than less effectiveness-minded people, I think it makes sense to pay a lot of attention to levels of involvement in the EA community. (See also.) Of course, someone can keep the values and behaviours without being involved in the community, as you note, but being in the community likely helps a lot of people retain and effectively act on those values.

And then, as discussed in Todd's post, we do have evidence that levels of engagement with the EA community reduces drop-out rates. (Which is not identical to value drift, and that's worth noting, but it still seems important and correlated.)

Finally, I think most of the other 9 areas you mention seem like they already receive substantial non-EA attention and would be hard to cost-effectively influence. That said, this doesn't mean EAs shouldn't think about such things at all. 

The post Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors is arguably one example of EAs considering efforts that would have that sort of scope and difficulty and that would potentially, in effect, increase altruism (though that's not the primary focus/framing). And I'm currently doing some related research myself. But it does seem like things in this area will be less tractable and neglected than many things EAs think about.

I think you make some good points. This post, plus Ben Todd's recent post, has updated me towards thinking that:

• we should often use the term "drop out rate" instead
• when using the term "value drift", we should ensure we've made it at least decently clear what we mean
  • Perhaps by saying things like "value drift away from EA", or "negative value drift", or just having a paragraph/footnote outlining what we are vs aren't counting

That said, I do think most writing I've seen on value drift has explicitly stated that one could separately ask how to precisely define this phenomena and how good vs bad it is, but that the post at hand will instead just provide empirical info on value drift. (The main posts that come to mind which I think did that are Todd's post and this post.) And that seems reasonable to me.

I'll provide some other minor pushbacks in separate comments. Most don't detract much from the key thrust of what you're saying.

Someone can also better introspect on their values and change their behavior consequently, even though their fundamental values haven't change.

I'd say that this would indeed not be fundamental value drift, but it seems ok to call it value drift. This was a change in what people think their values are, and in what values effectively influence their behaviours, and that's often what I care about in practice.

They mean something much more narrow, which is “someone becoming less of an effective altruist”. They never mention drifts from some altruistic values to other altruistic values or from some non-altruistic values to other non-altruistic values (ex.: going from a positive hedonist to a negative hedonist). And they especially never frame becoming more altruistic as a value drift, even though I have the impression a bunch of Effective Altruists approach outreach like that (but not everyone; ex.: Against moral advocacy). I feel it's missing perspective to frame 'value' in such a narrow idiosyncratic way.

I think these are interesting points, with some merit. But I also think a key point to note is that these conversations/writings are usually about value drift among EAs. Given that context, it seems to me understandable that the focus is on shifts from more to less altruism, rather than the inverse or shifts of the non-altruistic values. (That said, it is of course true that "even EAs" will have non-altruistic values that could shift.)

I also think "value drift" as typically used does include shifting from some altruistic values to other altruistic values. For example, I think if someone had been considering high-impact, EA-aligned careers but then switched to allocating most of their energies to things like working at a homeless shelter, this would typically be seen as value drift; the person is still altruistic, but no longer as effective. (Two caveats are required here: First, it's conceivable that for some people the highest impact option would be working at a homeless shelter. Second, a person can of course still "count as EA" even if they spend some of their energies on "common-sense" do-gooding.)

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I largely agree with you. I also think studying "pure" value drift (as opposed to "symptoms" of value drift, which is what a lot of the research in this area focuses on, including, to some extent, my own) comes with a few challenges. (Epistemic status: Pretty uncertain and writing this in haste. Feel free to tell me why I'm wrong.)

• EA isn't (supposed to be) dogmatic, and hence doesn't have clearly defined values. We're "effective" and we're "altruistic," and those are more or less the only requirements to being EA. But what is altruism? Is it altruistic to invest in yourself so you can have more of an impact later on in life? Effectiveness, on the surface, seems more objective, since it mostly means relying on high-quality evidence and reasoning. But evidence and reason can get messy and biased, which can make defining effectiveness more difficult. For example, even if valuing effectiveness leads you to choose to believe in interventions that have the most robust evidence, it's possible that that robust evidence might come from p-hacking, publication bias, or studies with an over-representation of middle-class people from high-income countries. At some point effectiveness (from the EA point of view) also hinges on a valuing certainty vs. risk-taking, and probably a number of other sub-values as well.
• Measuring raw values relies primarily on self-reporting, which is a notoriously unreliable social science method. People often say they value one thing and then act in a contradictory manner. Sometimes it's a signaling thing, but sometimes we just don't really understand ourselves that well. Classic example: a young college student says they don't care much about financial stability, until they actually enter the workforce, get a not-super-well-paid job, and realize that maybe they actually do care. I think this is a big reason why people have chosen to focus on behavior and community involvement. It's the closest thing to objective data we can get.

This isn't an argument against what you've written. I still think a lot of people err on assigning the label "value drift" to things like leaving the EA community that could be caused by a number of different scenarios in which it actually perfectly reflects your values to do that thing. I guess I don't know what the solution is here, but I do think it's worth digging into further.