I strongly believe in effective altruism and they do not. [...] I am being outvoted two-to-one by people who believe saving lives and saving souls are nearly equally important.
Differences in belief about what's important are somewhat independent from differences in disposition about pursuing effectiveness. A person may have very unusual beliefs about what's important (i.e. caring about lives of insects), but remain motivated to seek the most effective ways of influencing these things.
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One issue is that if you base your self-esteem on your rationality, that might make it more difficult to notice flaws in your rationality, for the same reasons as basing self-esteem on being a Nazi might've made it more difficult for historical Nazis to notice the issues. Hence the idea of keeping identity small, not including important things in it, to avoid that particular cause of misperceiving them.
See Cached Selves for more details. There does seem to be an important difference between the usual ideologies and technical subjects, in that ideologies allow much more wiggle room, which might be at the heart of the problem, see Ethnic Tension And Meaningless Arguments. Sidestepping that sort of vagueness by making sure a few key ideas remain clear is also the approach explored in Yudkowsky's How To Actually Change Your Mind, for example see The Scales of Justice, the Notebook of Rationality and Human Evil and Muddled Thinking.