I can also vouch for this. I think that the bay area climate is pretty great. Personally I dislike weather above 80 degrees F, so the Bay is roughly in my ideal range.
I've lived in SF and Berkeley and haven't found either to be particularly cloudy. I think that it really matters where you are in SF.
I was born in Sydney, but this is like, a minor part of the reason I’ve decided to stay here for the time being. However, there aren’t a lot of working EAs here, especially not in global health.
However, I make up for this by travelling long-term for big parts of the year. I spend a fair chunk of time in country or doing long stints in London during their summer (which is quite nice). You could pick a top EA hub to live in, just spend summer there, and travel the rest of the time—or live somewhere nice, and travel to the EA hub for a few months.
Alternatively, you could move to a nice city near a lot of EA hubs and with easy transport options. I’ve considered Barcelona for this purpose, since it’s a day’s train from London and 2 days from Berlin, but has great weather year-round. I know a few European digital nomads tend to be based around the Côte d'Azur for this reason (independently of EA).
If you want one place that checks all of your boxes, the Bay Area is probably the closest you’ll get without moving to Australia. A lower cost of living area with access to easy travel options might be your best bet if you have flexibility.
When I moved from Tucson to Oxford*, the weather change was more challenging than I expected. I stumbled into a (non-EA) community off the coast of Morocco and took a lot of $20 flights during the winter. That said, summer in the UK is pretty magical and most people learn to deal with the grey eventually.
*>350 days of sunshine per year vs. 1,615 total hours
A thing you could consider is that there are a bunch of EAGx's in warm/sunny places (Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, etc.). These cities maybe don't meet the definition of "hub", but they have enough people for a conference, which possibly will meet your needs.
You might want to consider EA Serbia, which I was told in answer to a similar question has a good community, at least big enough to have their own office. I didn't end up going there, so can't comment personally, but it's on a latitude with northern Italy, so likely to average pretty warm - though it's inland, so 'average' is likely to contain cold winters and very hot summers.
Hi! I'm really interested in effective altruism, and I would love to move somewhere that is both warm and sunny all year long but also has a lot of effective altruists. (I'm defining warm and sunny as being able to wear summer clothing and the sky being mostly blue all year long. I loved living in Phoenix, AZ, USA, which regularly gets to 110°F or 43°C during the summer and 65°F or 18°C in the winter)
Additionally, according to 80,000 Hours, the major EA hubs are:
The San Francisco Bay Area in California
London, Oxford, and Cambridge in the UK
Washington, DC (especially for US policy)
Boston and Cambridge in Massachusetts (especially for biorisk)
Plus New York, Sydney, Melbourne, Berlin, and many other major cities
The places the survey mentions that 80,000 Hours doesn't mention are all pretty cloudy as far as I know so I'll just discuss the 80,000 Hours places from her on.
As an American, I've heard the Bay Area, the US Northeast (DC, Boston, and Cambridge), and England are generally quite cloudy places, with the latter two being particularly cold most of the year.
The Bay Area is widely regarded as an ideal area to live, although it seems to be cloudy and slightly cold most of the year. (Edit: people in the comments have stated that the Bay Area tends to be reasonably sunny but also that it depends on which part you live in.) Its nearby areas areas get much warmer and sunnier in the summer but are also much colder and cloudier during the winter. Additionally, the nearby areas still seem like they would be too far away from the Bay Area to be worth living in.
Of the places 80,000 hours mentions, Sydney and Melbourne seem to be the most promising. They are both moderately warm and generally sunny (with Sydney getting more days of sunshine than Melbourne.)
Does any one know of good places to move that fit my criteria or any errors in what I've said?
I used AI to fix transcription errors, rerrarange the ideas, and suggest tweaks to the title and some sentences.
Three of the most exciting projects to come out of EA in recent years are, in a vague sense, CEA spinouts:
* Kairos is directly a spinout of CEA and now handles most support for university AI safety groups. Basically everyone I've found who knows them is really excited about what they do
* NEST is an opinionated ideas-fi...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
SF and Berkeley and south bay (San Jose/Palo Alto area) all have pretty different climates. Going off my memory:
It's true that SF is usually cloudy but that's not the case for the whole bay area. Berkeley/Oakland is sunny more often than not.
I can also vouch for this. I think that the bay area climate is pretty great. Personally I dislike weather above 80 degrees F, so the Bay is roughly in my ideal range.
I've lived in SF and Berkeley and haven't found either to be particularly cloudy. I think that it really matters where you are in SF.
Ah, thanks! That's exactly what I was looking for!