Originally Posted by
Algorithm 
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I will let both of them respond to my commentary, if they wish, but they both appear to believe that people cannot make up their own minds about attending AA, or the need to work the steps. I don't agree with that assessment, and I wouldn't agree with a similar assessment regarding any other approach, either.
Alcoholics and other addicted people are not nearly as incompetent as they are often made out to be by the experts. Their priorities are usually misplaced, but they are usually rather capable. They usually have to be clever by necessity, because maintaining an addiction is not easy.
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It must be down to our grade school writing that you are missing the point algo. It is not about intelligence or incompetence, or the newcomer deciding whether and how to do AA or not. It is much simpler than that.
The newcomer is faced with two questions to decide.
Do you want what we have?
If you do, are you willing to do what we did? Yes?
Well then, we better tell you what we did.
The crucial thing is that the newcomer is given the opportunity to check out the program as a basis for their decision. "This is what we did" doesn't carry the same weight if you didn't actually do it.
Many of us were, when we came to AA, on the verge of having out lives completely taken over by the state for our own good. Quite a few of us came to AA via institutions that do just that. Societies opinion seems to be that we were not capable of sanely or wisely running our own lives. We were too clever by half.