Centre for Enabling EA Learning & Research

I loved the simple core concept of a ‘catered hotel’ where select people can go to be supported in whatever efforts seem worthwhile. They are now broadening their approach, scaling up and focusing on logistical and community supports, incubation and a general infrastructure play on top of their hotel. This feels less unique to me now and more of a typical (EA UK) community play, so you should evaluate it on that basis.

Donate here, or reach out to contact@ceealar.org.

CEEALAR runs the EA Hotel. Recently, it has focused on supporting people who work on AI safety, including technical research and policy.

Something like the EA Hotel could end up accidentally accelerating AI capabilities, but I’m confident that won’t happen because Greg Colbourn, who runs the EA Hotel, is appropriately cautious about AI (he has advocated for a moratorium on AI development).

You could make a case that CEEALAR has a large multiplicative impact by supporting AI safety people. That case seems hard to make well, and in the absence of a strong case, CEEALAR isn’t one of my top candidates.

I'd be curious about:

• Some examples of successful projects that counterfactually came out of CEEALAR.
• Your expected success rate based on the last 5 years (or maybe the last year, since this might be more representative of future success rate). By success rate I mean something like "impactful projects counterfactually coming out of CEEALAR that are above your bar of net value worth 1.4k".
• Any examples of net negative projects or value that happened as a product of CEEALAR? Eg maybe someone being based in Blackpool who could instead have spent that time somewhere else, or some community health problem stemming out of many EAs living and working together.

I think this is a decent giving opportunity. Will consider if I have left over. Would broadly support this over funding independent researchers. This $1400/month covers housing and work space and some basic services (and maybe food?) for someone in London? Seems very good.