How to Choose the Right People to Trust

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I prefer calling it wise rather than smart. I think that we have a fundamental problem, though, which is like, how do you know who to trust? It's also a question of what is their incentive, right? Because you can have a wise person, but they're like incentivized towards achieving some outcome that's not in your self interest,. Mm hmm. So there's both, like wisdom, like you want to trust wise people, but then you also want to trust people who have like good intentions or altruistic or whoever interests their heart - exactly. And you can look at it also from your perspective.

What's the best way to help someone who's going through a difficult situation? What are the four states of distress? What are "comfort languages"? How can we introduce more nuance into our everyday thinking habits? When gathering information and forming opinions, how do you know who to trust? What's the difference between intelligence and wisdom?

Kat Woods is the co-founder of Charity Entrepreneurship, a startup incubator for effective altruist charities. It provides training, seed funding, and the other things necessary to kickstart an effective nonprofit. Previously, Kat co-founded Charity Science Outreach, a meta-organization that raised nine counterfactual dollars for high impact charities for every dollar spent. Subsequently she co-founded Charity Science Health, a direct poverty charity that received multiple grants from GiveWell and has served hundreds of thousands of families in India. You can find more about Kat at her website or on Twitter at @kat__woods.

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