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/
Note: I was previously CEO of CEA, but stepped down from that role about 9 months ago.
I've long been confused about the reputation Leverage has in the EA community. After hearing lots of conflicting reports, both extremely positive and negative, I decided to investigate a little myself. As a result, I've had multiple conversations with Geoff, and attended a training weekend run by Paradigm. I can understand why many people get a poor impression, and question the validity of their early stage research. I think that in the past, Leverage has done a poor job communicating their mission, and relationship to the EA movement. I'd like to see Leverage continue to improve transparency, and am pleased with Geoff's comments below.
Despite some initial hesitation, I found the Paradigm training I attended surprisingly useful, perhaps even more so than the CFAR workshop I attended. The workshop was competently run, and content was delivered in a polished fashion. I didn't go in expecting the content to be scientifically rigorous, most self improvement content isn't. It was fun, engaging, and useful enough to justify the time spent.
Paradigm is now running the EA summit. I know Mindy and Peter, some of the key organisers, through their long standing contributions to EA. They were both involved in running a successful student group, and Peter worked at CEA, helping us to organise EAG 2015. I believe that Mindy and Peter are dedicated EAs, who decided to organise this event because they would really like to see more focus on movement building in the EA community.
I've been wanting to see new and more movement building focused activities in EA. CEA can't do it all alone, and I generally support people in the EA community attempting ambitious movement building projects. Given this, and my positive experience attending an event put on by Paradigm, I decided to provide some funding for the EA Summit personally.
I don't think that Leverage, Paradigm or related projects are good use of EA time or money, but I do think the level of hostility towards them I've seen in this community is unwarranted, and I'd like to see us do better.