January to June: Highlights of the first half of 2024!

We’re very happy to announce that multilingual translator & animal activist, Ricard Soler, has joined the community building team alongside Mel Brennan. Ricard is now bringing his local knowledge and contagious enthusiasm for projects that improve the world to all our activities.

EA Barcelona collaborated with Norrsken House and Naked Innovations in inviting Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute to talk about the transformative potential of alternative proteins to an audience of 100 people. You can watch the talk on our Youtube channel here.

We participated in the Project for Awesome fundraising event to raise money for charity, and Give Directly and Against Malaria Foundation were successful in receiving more than $37,ooo each! You can watch the videos and subscribe to our EA Barcelona Youtube channel here.

We concluded our 5-week book club for The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef. Together, we enjoyed learning more about how cognitive biases affect our decision making skills, and the techniques we can apply to overcome them.

Pablo Rosado guided us through a structured discussion about the history of nuclear bombs, their destructive potential and ways in which members of the effective altruism community are trying to mitigate this risk. You can watch Pablo’s subsequent Youtube video on this topic here.

EA Barcelona hosted the Astral Codex Ten Annual Rationality Meetup in Parc Ciutadella. We had a lot of fun getting to know each other by playing some games to practise confidence calibration. Also, congratulations to Laura Correa for winning the chickpea counting contest!

The emerging AI Safety Barcelona community hosted its launch event at Universitat de Barcelona with two keynote speakers on recent developments in AI safety. You can watch the talks here and stay tuned for more AIS events soon!

Guillem Lajara, the CEO of Karoteno, organised a “giving game” at the local civic centre in El Prat. We learned how to compare the impact and cost effectiveness of three different charities and together decided how to split a sum of money between them.

Four of us headed off to London for the annual EA global conference, to learn about community building, AI safety and animal welfare, as well as making dozens of new connections with people working on different projects.

Tobi Baur took us through the history and development of OpenAI & the controversies surrounding the company over the past 12 months, then guided us through an open discussion on AI safety dilemmas.

And of course, throughout the year we have had plenty of coworking sessions. These sessions allow us to share our experiences & challenges, exchange resources and tap into each others' networks.