Rob Wiblin

challenge themselves to care about people and beings that were like very different from them, very far away from them in time and space.

So even the most like sort of quote-unquote vanilla like EA cause area of global poverty.

The vast majority of money that goes to alleviating poverty given by individuals in rich countries goes to helping other individuals in rich countries and

even though money could go much, much further overseas in countries where people have a much lower standard of living.

And the reason people donate locally is that they sort of feel more affinity for people who are closer to them and more similar to them.

And EA also has a lot of strains that sort of challenge people to extend care to animals, to extend care to future generations that may live like

thousands of years or millions of years in the future, to artificial intelligence also, if it can be something that has consciousness and can feel pain and so on.

And that was really appealing to me.

But then there were also just like, there's a way of going about doing things that was also very appealing to me.

Which is like, they were very nerdy, they were very intellectual, they were like, really like...

thinking stuff through and almost like innovating methodologically on like, how can we figure out which charities are better than which other charities?

And like, there are lots of like interesting like arguments thrown around for this.

And they were all, they were very transparent.

Like there was just a culture of like,

open debate and like admitting your mistakes.

GiveWell, like an early sort of pillar of the early EA movement, had a mistakes page on its website where it just discussed mistakes it had made.

They were very like honest and high integrity in like an interesting way that doesn't obviously follow from like

caring about other beings more.

For example, GiveWell refused to do donation matching because donation matching is usually a scam where the big donor would have given that much anyway, even if you hadn't made your donation.

So that whole package was really attractive to me.