Rob Wiblin

I think I'm someone that just really benefits from...

structure and from sort of like emotional motivation reinforcement.

And I also just like very much tend to like a little bit socially conform or like I think I tend to like try and achieve the ideal of like the community I'm in.

And I think the ideal of like sort of my corner of the EA community is sort of like you said, it's just like to like

have a really impactful job and then do a really good job at it and work a lot of hours at it.

Um, and so that's like the message you get from the community.

And that's like what I'm trying to do.

But I think I personally would have liked, yeah, a bit more of a like spiritual angle to the community and a bit more like, um, if you read my colleague, Joe Carl Smith's blog, I think I get some of that like existential reflection about like, um,

our morality and our values and this crazy thing that so many EAs believe that in a matter of like a decade or two we might be in an utterly transformed world that might be like relative to this vantage point like utopic or dystopic and just like grappling with that and like I think you know I think if there had been like an EA church where like every Sunday like someone who's like really good and thoughtful about these issues like

Spoken from the pulpit.

Spoke about them and led a discussion about them.

I think that would have been very enriching for my life and probably ultimately made me be higher impact.

But that's just not how the EA community is structured.

And it's sort of deliberately not structured that way because it's like the professional community aspect of EA, you really want to not care if people...

believe the like deepest you know teachings and philosophical orientation you really want to just be like you know if you're doing great safety research like and then we kind of don't care about safety research um so so they're like uh incentives of a professional community pull against like what i might personally want here

Whereas I want to go home and think about it in a different way.

I'm like, I mean, I already go home and think about my work all day.

So like I like frequently have insomnia where I think about my work and I just want to be like, instead of thinking about the next Google doc I need to write or the next email I need to send, like I would like to be like, I don't know, spiritually marinating.

Like, yeah, exactly.

Yeah.