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: 1,509
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?
ACX Spring Meetups Everywhere 2026
How to fundraise € 110 million for effective charities
Peak Impact (Grunewald Hike)
Update: I pitched in the EA Youtubers group, but no-one has responded (yet), so if you, dear reader, would like to be the first one making a video about this, or pitch it to your favorite youtuber, go ahead!
This would make a great story for a Youtube video.
Has anyone covered this yet? Couldn’t find it.
I’ll pitch it in the EA Youtubers group, just in case someone wants to pick it up, or keep it in mind for later, if similar opportunities arise in a future crisis.
Thanks for writing this up!
Agree that effective (data-driven, …) democracy interventions are probably still neglected. Curious if you or anyone else here has specific initiatives they’d recommend people donate to, volunteer or work for.
For my home country Germany, some things that come to mind:
- making government more effective (better comms, less bureaucracy, tax reform, ..) --> citizens trust their government more (like in Norway) --> less susceptible to anti-democratic forces
- making institutions to safeguard democracy more effective, like the Bundesverfassungsschutz (German equivalent to FBI, domestic intelligence service to protect the constitution)
- investigative journalism like correctiv.org
- campaigning and movement building—
maybe also election campaigns & comms work for specific pro-democratic parties, if that’s your comparative advantage (Greens, Volt, Linke, SPD, …)
- social media regulation to reduce polarization, maybe?
- fundraising for all the above—most of them seem funding constrained, and democracy is a “hot topic”, that could reach many more potential donors
Cool!
Could be a worthwhile home investment for particularly immunocompromised people too.
I sent this to a friend who had really bad covid several times.
Same question, I’m talking to a German donor looking for an American donor for a donation swap, let me know if you’re interested!
They want to donate to lightcone, and could donate to any effective charity listed on effektivspenden.de (cause areas AI, bio, animals, climate, global health & poverty)
Promising results! I forwarded it to psychedelics researcher who could maybe help with advocacy.
If you want to support this, consider taking a moment to consider whether you, or anyone you know, might be able to contribute. The post says donors, entrepreneurs and advocates are most needed.
Maybe a video of patients sharing their experience might also help make this cause more appealing to a wider range of donors and advocates.
Anecdotally, I heard similar stories from DMT (consumed in the form of Ayahuasca specifically), but only from multiple high dosages over the course of several days.
Curious if there’s any evidence that vaping a micro dosage is also riskier than people might think. Most psychedelics seem very low risk on micro dosage level, I’d guess DMT is similar?
Not recommending anyone should take DMT, obviously, I hope you’ll find a non-hallucinogenic, safe and legal version.
The last pre-party (by humans) - AI Safety Musical Pre-Party
invoke our common humanity, instead of our disparate diets
I really like this approach. I could see a lot of omnivores get behind “demanding better standards” too, and happily spend a (tiny) bit more money on groceries, knowing that this significantly increases welfare.
TLDR: Reach more people by sharing on TED’s YouTube channel?
Great work, much appreciated!
Side note: Looks like TED did not (yet?) share your talk on their YouTube channel as well, although the talk took place in April already. Not sure why, maybe it’s a business decision, maybe they share only a fraction of TED talks on their YouTube, maybe it’s something else.
For reach, it seems pretty important to share it on YouTube as well? Does anyone have insights in TED’s YouTube channel policy, and ideas whether we can do anything to get it shared there?
Until then, some random YouTuber with <100 followers uploaded it here:
Related question: How often do you run a public open hiring round and end up hiring someone already on your radar, who would have been part of your closed hiring round as well?
Not saying this is always bad, the public hiring round might still have been worthwhile in expectation, I’m just curious how often these things happen. Probably various a lot between roles & orgs.
I also wonder whether we could do some kind of standardized test once a year on things that EA orgs uniquely care about, like reasoning transparency or understanding of EA, and then various EA orgs could use that for their hiring.
If requires some initial coordination & investment, but after that it could save both orgs and applicants quite some time and money.
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.