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/
Thanks. This is useful feedback :)
Yeah, to be fair, I was writing these comments in rapid succession based on information unique to me to quickly prevent the mischaracterization of the EA Summit next week. I am both attending the EA Summit next week, and I am significantly personally invested in it as representing efforts in EA I'd like to see greatly advanced. I also have EA projects I've been working on I intend to talk about at the EA Summit next week. (In spite of acknowledging my own motive here, I still made all my previous comments with as much fidelity as I could muster.)
All this made me write these comments hastily enough that I write in long sentences. Mentally, when writing quickly, it's how I condense as much information into as few clauses as possible in making arguments. You're not the first person to tell me writing shorter and simpler sentences would be easier to read. In general, when I'm making public comments without a time crunch, these days I'm making more of a conscious effort to be more comprehensible :)
This is useful feedback, but English not being your first language is a factor too, because that isn't how "idiosyncratic" is spelled. :P
I also would not expect effective altruists not fluent in English to be able to follow a lot of what I write (or a lot of posts written in EA, for that matter). Often because of the continually complicated discourse exclusively in English in EA, I forget to write with a readership which largely doesn't speak English as a first language. I'll keep this more in mind for how I write my posts in the future.
I’m unconvinced that ole_koksvik’s fluency in English has anything to do with it. Fluent English speakers misspell words like “idiosyncratic” regularly, and I and other fluent English speakers also find your posts difficult to follow. I generally end up skimming them, because the ratio of content to unnecessary verbosity is really low. If your goal is to get your evidence and views onto the table as quickly as possible, consider that your current strategy isn’t getting them out there at all for some portion of your audience, and that a short delay for editing could significantly expand your reach.