Exactly this - it's not a perfect science but it is also a little more complex taking into account QALYs which are quality adjusted life years. Given two options for your $100 donation where one would give 100 QALYs in a poorer country, that is give 100 years of good quality life in total, verses 1 QALY in the West EA argues you should go for the former. It's hard though because people like charity they can see (local) and feel an obligation to donate to their own areas first (which I totally get and feel myself).

I view it the same way I view my stock investments - how do I get the most bang for my dollar, how do I get the most QALYs for my charitable giving. There is huge room for error here but the differences tend to be in orders of magnitude so you can be fairly certain the option is 'better' when you compare, but it gets really complex when you start to speculate on what that person might then do (for example thought experiments like wether you should save the lives of 10 children or one old philantrophist who is about to make a huge donation that will save 10,000 children but whose family won't make that donation if he dies).

Similar methodology, perhaps, not philosophy.

Both seek to objectively measure impact across multiple causes e.g. healthcare, education and other disparate philanthropic domains.

The scoping is, however, as you note, different. Robinhood holds that a life nearby is more valuable to the people near it than one faraway. (There is also an institutional component to this argument. A life elevated in New York has a higher chance of producing multi-generational change than one in an intermittent war zone. Though the war zone is in part a product of that depression.) So helping one person in the Bronx at the cost of five in Sub-Saharan Africa is okay, but helping one person in Manhattan over two in Queens is not. (Drastically oversimplifying, but you get the point.)

> company's philanthropic arms

The Foundation has nothing to do with Robinhood, the company.