> Accelerating the development of developing countries enables us to have more minds working on actually difficult tasks like curing cancer in all of its forms, managing and curing our planet, curing diseases that plague humanity, and finally advance our civilization

Helping the neighbour is a metaphor. It means helping to concrete people with concrete actions.

It does not need to be your neighbor, you can go for missions in developing countries if you want (I live in a developing country right now).

To give you an example, a group of friends here once helped a person we know with the money for heart surgery, something people here cannot pay.

Instead of "oh, all we want free health care" and ask everyone else to pay the costs (to the rich!, to the blabla, etc.) and give the money to a bureaucrat so that they do with the money god knows what (you did not see the villas they own! Amazing!) what we did is to help a person we know we are really helping with their disease. Much more effective if you ask me.

> Local improvements do not propagate further if you are isolated, and thus you miss the big picture.

Development aids usually end up in the pocket of bureaucrats. It is better that you go do something for someone, even in a remote place and see what is going on than to just give to see what happens, which also, as I said, make people skip their worries: oh, we already give these people that, we are not bad. This is just a mechanism to feel better. It is just that it is not what happens. Bureaucrats can control the flow of money and we all know there is corruption and a lot of inefficiencies as well in how it is managed. What they cannot control is personal decisions where things do not go through them. So if we have good intentions, I think the best we can do is to do by ourselves or through the people we trust.

> This by the way is a well studied phenomenon and is the core difference between "conservatives" and "progressives"

No, this is a well-known thing in psychology where there have been experiments with groups of people where the more people you put, at the moment of simulating things like heart attacks, etc. to see how they reacted, when there is only one person there they try super fast to help, the more people you put the more "other will do it" happens.

> where the former considers their local community, but the latter considers systematic improvements

I still have to see what those systematic improvements collectivism has brought to the world in the broad sense. All of it starts in individual decisions and are usually better brought up when incentives fall on a few, not on too many.

> From my experience, the latter understands that the issues faced by other communities are issues they could have faced as well, and therefore see it as their responsibility to help them

This is not what happens in practice. If you are worried about others as in "progressive" as you define it, you still get your nice clothes, your Iphone and many other things as there are still people in trouble. If it is your brother or your mother or a very good friend there is a strong trend for you willing to sacrifice all those things if necessary. This is not bad or good, this is human nature, whether you like it or not.

I am pretty convinced that among the people that want to "help others" in the general sense, talking about people with real ambitions to rule, not normal people with good intentions, we have the worst people. Because they put a custom on top of them for marketing, but their real intentions are not those. But even with good intentions, there is the problem of calculus from a centralized organization. So it is more inefficient than alternative mechanisms.