Rob Wiblin

It helped them trust that the recommendations were actually real recommendations and they weren't being spun something and they weren't being sold something like all the rest of the charity recommendation ecosystem.

But then when you move away from that being your primary method of change, when instead you've actually attracted quite a lot of funders, and now you're trying to use that money and the talent that you've attracted to achieve things in the world, maybe things that involve a lot of politics, then the like...

the being extremely transparent can be very challenging, especially because donors want privacy or if you're running a political campaign, you don't want your opponents to know exactly your strategy and the ways that you think you might have made mistakes.

It's just like this is not how most of the real world works.

Yeah, yeah.

And so there was this tension between the goals, which I felt like I should only care about the goals of EA.

So sort of what EA told me and it kind of made sense to me was that like the point here is to help others as much as possible.

The point is not to conform to an aesthetic or like do things in a way that feels like cleanest or prettiest.

But at the same time, I think I was to some extent kidding myself about how much of my own motivation and my own attraction to the concept came from just the goals, just pillar one and altruism versus pillars two and three of that intellectual depth and intellectual creativity and this crazy high level of openness, transparency, having absolutely nothing to hide, letting all comers come.

Like, I think for me, like as a, as a fact about my psychology, the latter two things were actually really important for my motivation.

Um, and they were sort of over time, just like smaller and smaller, like features of like what it was like to do EA, like to, to, to try and like pursue EA goals in my career.

Even before the latest round that started in 2023 of AI policy heating up, OpenPhil compromised a lot on its initial wild ambitions for transparency.

At the beginning, there was this idea that we would publish the grants we decided not to make and explain why we decided not to make them when people came to us for grants.

There's a reason most organizations don't do that.

For our earliest two program officer hires,

We have a whole blog post that we wrote about their strengths and weaknesses as a candidate and alternatives we considered and how confident are we that this will work out.

We stopped doing that.

So it's just like there is a level of transparency that's just like,

I still in my heart want that, but it's like absolutely insane.

And then I think the adversarial pressure that you mentioned makes it so that like OpenPhil as an organization that like,