Currently working on aisafety.berlin and a matching tool.
ex-director of EA Germany, EA Berlin and EAGxBerlin 2022
Happy to connect, message me with your ideas, proposals, feedback, connections or just random thoughts!
Manuel Allgaier
Karma: 1,547
@Austin I appreciate your transparency and willignness to respond on all this!
If you can share, I’d be curious to hear if the responses here in this thread changed how you feel about hiring Caroline, and if there’s any amount of “(EA) charities / donors stop using Manifund” that would make you think it might have been the wrong call in hindsight.
I was quite a fan of Manifund, for making small-scale crowdfunding easier, and I’m sad to see that it’s now practically unusuable for many (EA) charities and donors.
Nothing I’m aware of in this case, I was talking more generally. I know at least one case where I think someone got rejected from an American EA organizer, when the average German EA organizer would likely have accepted them, and there are likely more.
Independent funding really helps!
I got all my funding applications from CEA approved (for EA Berlin, EA Germany, and EAGxBerlin, between 2019-22, I’m no longer affiliated with EA Germany), and I’m very grateful for CEA and its donors, but still, I found it at times challenging to know that the organization I was building, serving a community of ~500 active EAs at the time, is financially dependent on one foundation, with their own constraints that might be different from EA Germany.
(I think @Rob Gledhill , CEA community building grants manager at the time, did a great job managing this dilemma, but even a great grant maker can not replace funding diversification)
FWIW, I think it’s possible to cooperate with CEA wherever possible (your post reads a bit antagonistic to me) and still make your own decisions on event admissions.
This might be the way to go indeed, especially if in situations where it seems like there might be a cultural difference, like in edge cases where CEA would lean towards rejections but (German) volunteer organizers or even EA Germany lean towards accepting the person.
I think “organizers should invite who they want” (with no accountability or anything), is an okay norm for private events, but not sufficient for major EA community events.
Whenever I’ve organized EA-branded events, I’ve tried to do what’s best for the attendees and for the community I’m representing, and also admitted people I personally disliked or felt unsure about. Rejecting them would have felt off, without at least other organizers reviewing that, and (whenever possible) getting the applicant’s own version of a story.
Appreciate the transparency and reflection!
So much of these decisions are made confidentially, without the person affected getting a chance to share their perspective or even learn why they got rejected. Really appreciate your transparency here!
Getting European AI Right—with Europe 2031 Co-author Dr. Philip Fox
Agree, I think people should “be the change they want to see” more often, especially in community / field building.
One caveat: Understand reputational harm risks and manage them (don’t overestimate them either)
If your projects includes using the EA brand for outreach or other public comms, I’d recommend at least informing CEA or a local (full-time, paid) EA community builder, and asking if there’s anything you should consider.
In some cases, there might be downside risks to other EA orgs or EA as a whole, some of which you might overlook, especially if you’re new to EA community building or haven’t yet gotten a lot of feedback. If that’s the case, you can still do the project, maybe just not using the EA brand, or maybe test it small-scale first, with people who can give you honest feedback, before scaling up.
(this is just my personal opinion, informed by my time as EA Germany director until 2022, but not speaking for EA Germany or any other EA org)
Bores lost, quite narrowly, with 35% to 39%.
Interestingly an anti AI regulation super PAC spent $8m against Bores, which apparently triggered other PACs to spend $19m for his campaign. In a small race of only ~100k votes, that’s $ ~270 per vote.
Curious if that changes anyone’s stance towards political donations on such AI regulation candidates.
More context
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/us/politics/new-york-primary-bores-lasher-ai.html
Update: After doing her research, she’s planning to vote for him, and even campaigned a bit for him among her NY-12 friends and colleagues :)
Thanks!
I had quick look into Alex Bores campaign, sounds promising. I shared it with an EA friend who happens to be a registered Democrat in NY-12, and could vote for him. She said she’ll look into it and share it with other voters.
Last year’s summer camp was (again) one of my highlights. Reconnected with old friends, and made some new ones, some of which I’m still in touch with.
Glad you’re organizing this again, very excited :)
(If you, after reading this, are still unsure about applying, feel free to message me (email / telegram), I can give my honest advice on whether you’d find this valuable or not.)
Curious what readers here think!
Ideally read/skim both @Marcus Abramovitch’s post and @Jhrosenberg’s response (currently top comment) before voting.
Note this will obviously not be representative, it’s just a quick opinion poll.
If you’re wondering in 2026, there’s still a bunch of EAs & AI Safety folks on Focusmate.
The free Focusmate version is limited to three sessions a week. If you want to try Focusmate Plus (unlimited sessions), you can use my referral link[1] for a free 30 Days Plus Trial when signing up (no credit card needed) and then join the EA Focusmate group
Thanks @annaleptikon for setting this up, much appreciated!- ^
If you subscribe after, I also get a month free. You can also just keep using Focusmate Free after (limited three sessions per week). Anna, you set this up, if you want to share your own referral link here I’ll delete mine.
- ^
Inside Berlin Politics with Pia
staying in the ideation phase
To add to this, my sense is that int/a seems very thoughtful, but also quite slow-moving.
I liked the people I met in int/a meetups, very warm, friendly, considerate and thoughtful. Great vibes!
My main critique would be there could be more output: More meetups, forum posts like this shared sooner (less polished is totally fine), more action.
Part of this is probably also due to int/a being currently entirely (?) volunteer-run. If int/a gets funding, I’d be excited to see more output.
Thanks!
I would be very cautious with making any (hard to reverse) career decisions dependent on the Anthropic IPO.
Reminds me of the FTX Future Fund situation—suddenly there was twice (?) as much AI safety funding available, many people quit their (E2G) job to start a new AI safety org, and then a few months later, the funds disappeared, and we were back to pre-FTX funding levels but now with many more people in direct AIS work, leading to a much higher funding bar than before. (This is of course different, Anthropic is not FTX)
It’s hard to estimate how many people back then took costly, hard to reverse career decisions that seemd worthwhile in expectation, but regrettable without FTX funds—maybe 100s?
Who else is planning to go? --> comment :)