I’d be doing less good with my life if I hadn’t heard of effective altruism
I think I was pretty close to getting stuck in a semi-random corporate career path. I was always sympathetic to EA like ideas. But I think seeing EA’s actually ‘do the thing’ made me think I could and should do the thing too. I remember some feeling of “Well, I think that’s 100% the correct approach, and I guess if these people are doing it I have no excuse but to do it too”
We’re excited to officially announce dates for EA Global: London 2026! From May 29–31, we’ll be hosting attendees at the InterContinental London – The O2 again.
Applications will open later this year.
We’re also aiming to confirm EA Global: Bay Area 2026 for February and will share more details as soon as possible.
As we look ahead, I wanted to highlight that EAG London 2025 was our biggest EAG ever! But more than that, it was our highest rated event on record and one of our most cost-effective, based on net cost per attendee.
Thanks to everyone who participated. You can watch some of the talks from the event here (with more videos to come). I’ll also be posting a longer reflection on EA Global: 2025 later this week or next, including why it went so well and what this means for EA Global moving forward!
The percentage of EAs earning to give is too low
I’d be excited for more people to consider it as an option—particularly given how funding landscape continues to evolve, and particularly thinking of Earning to Give as ‘career to maximise donations’ and not ‘normal career while donating 10%’
Well done on a great event! I’m really excited about low-cost, small events to help connect the community. We’ve made some progress in bringing down EAG costs since 2023 (EAG London this year will hopefully cost roughly 40% less per attendee as in 2023!), but I’m excited for events like this (and the EA Summits program our CEA colleagues are running) to keep happening and encouraging my team to reflect on our spending!
(I’m the EA Global Program Lead at CEA)
Thanks for your feedback (I lead the EAG team)! We value EAG referrals very highly and are really grateful for anyone who refers someone to us. As discussed in the post, rewards are intended “as small tokens of appreciation, not as financial incentives”. We hope they’re fun ways to show our appreciation and draw people’s attention to the fact that they could be referring people.
We want to make sure we’re not trivialising referrals though, and we’ll bear this feedback in mind. Are you suggesting it would be better to have no incentive, or a more substantial monetary incentive?
Hi Henri, sorry for the delay in getting back to you—we should have an update to share very soon!
Thanks Wyatt, we’re aware these timings can be hard for students. We’re looking into what we could organise in the summer to be more accessible.
I think there’s a nice hidden theme in the EAG Bay Area content, which is about how EA is still important in the age of AI (disclaimer: I lead the EAG team, so I’m biased). It’s not just a technical AI safety conference, but it’s also not ignoring the importance of AI. Instead, it’s showing how the EA framework can help prioritise AI issues, and bring attention to neglected topics.
For example, our sessions on digital minds with Jeff Sebo and the Rethink team, and our fireside chat with Forethought on post-AGI futures, demonstrate how there’s important AI related work that EA is key in making happen, and that others will neglect. And I think sessions like the AI journalism lightning talks and the screening of the animated series ‘Ada’ also demonstrate how a wide variety of careers and skillsets are important in addressing risks from AI, and why it’s valuable for EA to be a broad and diverse movement.
We of course still have some great technical content, such as Ryan Greenblatt discussing the Alignment Faking paper. (And actually perhaps my favourite sessions are the non-AI sessions… I’m really excited to hear more about GiveWell’s re-evaluation of GiveDirectly!). But I think the content helps remind me and demonstrate to me why I think the EA community is so valuable, even in the age of AI, and why I think it’s still worthwhile for me to work on EA community building!
Applications close this Sunday (Feb 9th) if you want to come join us in the Bay!
EAG Bay Area Application Deadline extended to Feb 9th – apply now!
We’ve decided to postpone the application deadline by one week from the old deadline of Feb 2nd. We are receiving more applications than in the past two years, and we have a goal of increasing attendance at EAGs which we think this will help. If you’ve already applied, tell your friends! If you haven’t — apply now! Don’t leave it till the deadline!
You can find more information on our website.
Hi Niklas, Thanks for your comment. I’m the program lead for EAGs. I’ve put a few of my thoughts below:
I definitely would like to reduce the chances of people getting ill at EAGs!
I think adding air purification could be more logistically challenging than it seems – e.g., I think given the size of our spaces, we’d need more like 100+ air purifiers. This then also needs quite a lot of coordination in terms of power supplies, delivery and movement.
It does unfortunately tradeoff against other marginal EAG improvements, as we have limited organiser capacity to invest in new improvements.
I feel unsure about what the net benefit of air purifiers would be (e.g., this initial post and the Berlin talk you reference seem to be discussing UVC lamps as opposed to air purifiers).
If anyone did provide or point to a more fleshed out estimate of costs and benefits, I could definitely imagine prioritising this more, and it is on the list of things we would like to look into more!
Thanks! Yes you’re correct that EAG Bay Area this year won’t be GCR-focused and will be the same as other EAGs. Briefly, we’re dropping the GCR-focus as CEA is aiming to focus on principles-first community building, and because a large majority of attendees last year said they would have attended a non-GCR focused event anyway.
EA Global: Bay Area 2026 will be taking place February 13–15 at the Hilton Union Square. Applications will open later this year.
We chose to delay our 2026 announcement to allow us more time to search for the best venue. We’re now excited to be announcing our new venue and location and look forward to seeing many people in February!