Resources spent
- Leverage Research has now existed for over 7.5 years1
- Since 2011, it has consumed over 100 person-years of human capital.
- From 2012-16, Leverage Research spent $2.02 million, and the associated Institute for Philosophical Research spent $310k.23
Outputs
Some of the larger outputs of Leverage Research include:
- Work on Connection Theory: although this does not include the initial creation of the theory itself, which was done by Geoff Anders prior to founding Leverage Research
- Contributions to productivity of altruists via the application of psychological theories including Connection Theory
- Intellectual contributions to the effective altruism community: including early work on cause prioritisation and risks to the movement.
- Intellectual contributions to the rationality community: including CFAR’s class on goal factoring
- The EA Summits in 2013-14: The EA summit is a precursor to EA Global, which is being revived in 2018
Its website also has seven blog posts.4
Recruitment Transparency
- Leverage Research previous organized the Pareto Fellowship in collaboration with another effective altruism organization. According to one attendee, Leverage staff were secretly discussing attendees using an individual Slack channel for each.
- Leverage Research has provided psychology consulting services using Connection Theory, leading it to obtain mind-maps of a substantial fraction of its prospective staff and donors, based on reports from prospective staff and donors.
- The leadership of Leverage Research have on multiple occasions overstated their rate of staff growth by more than double, in personal conversation.
- Leverage Research sends staff to effective altruism organizations to recruit specific lists of people from the effective altruism community, as is apparent from discussions with and observation of Leverage Research staff at these events.
- Leverage Research has spread negative information about organisations and leaders that would compete for EA talent.
General Transparency
- The website of Leverage Research has been excluded from the Wayback Machine5
- Leverage Research has had a strategy of using multiple organizations to tailor conversations to the topics of interest to different donors.
- Leverage Research had longstanding plans to replace Leverage Research with one or more new organizations if the reputational costs of the name Leverage Research ever become too severe. A substantial number of staff of Paradigm Academy were previously staff of Leverage Research.
General Remarks
Readers are encouraged to add additional facts known about Leverage Research in the comments section, especially where these can be supported by citation, or direct conversational evidence.
Citations
1. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/969wcdD3weuCscvoJ/introducing-leverage-research
2. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/453989386
3. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/452740006
4. http://leverageresearch.org/blog
5. https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://leverageresearch.org/
As an attendee to the 2018 EA Summit, I've been informed by the staff of Paradigm Academy that not even the whole organization, nor Leverage Research, initiated this idea. Geoff Anders nor the executive leadership of Leverage Research are the authors of this Summit. I don't know the hierarchy of Paradigm Academy or where Mindy McTeigue or Peter Buckley, the primary organizers of the Summit, fall in it. As far as I can tell, the EA Summit was independently initiated by these staff at Paradigm and other individual effective altruists they connected with. In the run-up to organizing this Summit, the organizations these individual community members are staff at became sponsors of the EA Summit.
Thus, the Local Effective Altruism Network; Charity Science; Paradigm Academy and the CEA are all participants at this event, endorsing the goal of the Summit within EA, without those organizations needing to endorse each other. That's an odd question to ask. Must each EA organization endorse every other involved at EA Global, or any other EA event, prior to its beginning for the community to regard it as "genuinely EA?"
As far as I can tell, while Paradigm is obviously physically hosting the event, what it means for the CEA and the other organizations to be participating organizations is just that, officially supporting these efforts at the EA Summit itself. It means no more and no less than for any organization other than what Julia stated in her comment.
Also, I oppose using or pressuring the CEA in a form of triangulation, and to be cast by default as the most legitimate representation of the whole EA movement. Nothing I know about the CEA would lead me to believe they condone the type of treatment where someone tries speaking on their behalf in any sense without prior consent. Also, past my own expectations, the EA community recently made clear they don't as a whole give license to the CEA represent EA as a whole however they want. Nonetheless, to the point of vocally disagreeing with what I saw as a needless pile-on Nick Beckstead and the CEA, in that thread I've made an effort to maintain an ongoing and mutually respectful conversation.
Evan, thank you for these comments here. I just wanted to register, in case it's at all useful, that I find it a bit difficult to understand your posts sometimes. It struck me that shorter and simpler sentences would probably make this easier for me. But I may be totally ideosyncratic here (English isn't my first language), so do ignore this if it doesn't strike you as useful.