Note that CEA is specifically a community-building organization, > Our mission is to build and nurture a global community of people who are thinking carefully

Note that CEA is specifically a community-building organization, > Our mission is to build and nurture a global community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them. We hope that this community can help to build a radically better world. > To foster this community, we run conferences, support hundreds of local groups, and provide online resources and forums for discussion. You shouldn't imagine that people are donating to generic maximal impact causes and the money is ending up in surprise luxury real estate. (Or, at least, if it is then that's news to me.) When CEA says (paraphrasing) ‘this is a reasonable way to spend the money we have on hosting a ton of conferences,’ the ‘host a ton of conferences’ part is an inherited assumption from this being CEA money (a specific grant for this purpose, in this case), not a broader claim about the value of lots of conferences vs. global health charities.