As an attendee, I don't understand why you can't just only do a few 1-1s with people who you are confident it would be useful to talk to, and go to talks or work for most of the conference time.

I assume that's how the famous people you mentioned navigate these events.

I can imagine that for speakers it can be demoralizing to spend a lot of time preparing a talk for an empty audience, but that's separate from the issues you mentioned.

Many people claim that Elon Musk is an EA person, @Cole Killian has an EA Forum account and mentioned effective altruism on his (now deleted) website, Luke Farritor won the Vesuvius Challenge mentioned in this post (he also allegedly wrote or reposted a tweet mentioning effective altruism, but I can't find any proof and people are skeptical)

I can't say that we agree on very much

This is probably off-topic, but I was very surprised to read this, given how much he supported the Harris campaign, how much he gives to reduce global poverty, and how similar your views are on e.g. platforming controversial people.

Thank you for sharing this. Could you clarify what you mean by "my core values [...] no longer aligned."?

Our funding bar is higher now than it was in previous years, and there are projects which EAIF funded in previous years that we would be unlikely to fund now.

Could you expand on why that's the case? Is the idea that you believe those projects are net negative, or that you would rather marginal donations go to animal welfare and the long term future instead of EA infrastructure?

I think it's a bit weird for donors who want to donate to EA infrastructure projects to see that initiatives like EA Poland are funding constrained while the EA Infrastructure fund isn't, and extra donations to the EAIF will likely counterfactually go to other cause areas.

Amazing talk!

Is it the same as last year's The Vegan Blindspot talk? Or were there any updates besides removing mentions of "vegans" to appeal to a more general audience?

I can't find the original anymore but it seems very similar to what I remember.

Curious about your theory of change. Is the idea to fundraise for Wild Animal Initiative, to encourage people to work on wild animal suffering, or something else?

As I mentioned here, I think people really shouldn't treat EAG acceptance as a measure of moral worth. Plenty of people with no EA achievements got accepted and some people with impressive achievements got rejected.

I would really interpret it as "how much does a CEA staff member reviewing 1000 applications believe that going to EAG would help me or others do more good, based on my answers to three short questions"

I would really recommend against spending a lot of time filling in the application. For that to be valuable you would need to believe all the below:

1. You attending EAG will lead to a lot of good happening, even after considering that:
   1. All the main talks are recorded
   2. People who would accept a 1-1 meeting with you would also reply to an email or message from you
   3. Many people were rejected from EAG and later found no issues working on very impactful projects
   4. There are EAGx and EAGVirtual events which offer similar opportunities, and several EAG conferences every year.
2. CEA staff will not be able to notice 1. if you spend a short time answering those three questions
3. CEA staff will be able to notice 1. if you spend a lot of time answering those three questions
    

If I was CEA staff, I wouldn't want to miss out on someone that would cause a lot of good by attending, just because they didn't spend a ton of time goodharting the application form. I'll let CEA staff confirm or deny this, but I think they even reach out to applicants asking for more information if they can't make a decision based on the contents of the application.

I don't think spending three or more hours on an EAG application is a good use of time, I'm honestly shocked to hear that anyone spent more than an hour on it. It's three short questions.

If going to EAG would help you do so much more good that it's worth working >=3 hours on an application, I would guess you can just write the reason why it's so valuable and you'll likely be accepted.