Rob Wiblin

I think it really hit a lot of psychological buttons for me at once and really felt like my people and the way I wanted to live my life.

I know, and just like an extremely like...

fastidious and like exacting level of integrity that like other movements even other pretty high integrity movements like weren't aspiring to even beyond like what people are even asking yeah yeah you're just like proactively say like by the way did you know donation matching is a scam that's why we're not doing it even though even though we would get more donations to help

poor people.

It's interesting that that was such a natural part of the early EA movement, even though you're sort of giving up on impact.

Yeah, I think the intellectual depth was very much there in other parts of the EA ecosystem, especially AI safety and thinking through how exactly would you control early transformative AI systems and things like that.

And like I said, my heart was always pulled towards those kinds of questions, even though I worked at a grant-making organization.

Yeah, I mean, I think that if I had graduated college in 2022 instead of 2016, like in 2016, I graduated college, I went to GiveWell.

And like a big part of why I went to GiveWell at the time was that they had the most intellectual depth on this question of like, what are the best charities?

Yeah.

And if I had graduated college in 2022, I probably would have done MATS, which is this program to like upskill in ML AI safety research and then tried to join an AI safety group, you know?

So I think I'm, I'm sort of naturally drawn to, to like actually doing the research in some sense.

So, so in that sense, it was sort of a mundane issue that like my job, especially after Holden left and the demand for that kind of like research evaporated a little bit at the leadership level.

It was like,

If I were to start over again, probably I wouldn't have applied to join OpenPhil.

I probably would have applied to join an AI safety group.

But then I think the third thing of just this extremely, almost comically high level of integrity that I really, really liked was also eroding over the years just as like...

When I think about why, I think that when a lot of the focus of the EA movement was convincing really smart people to donate differently, being extremely unusually high integrity was actually just really...

valuable and powerful asset.

Obviously people like me and very wealthy people that were early GiveWell donors really liked that GiveWell had a mistakes page and really liked that whole ethos and that whole package.