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/
An article in Splinter News was released few days ago, showing leaked emails where Jonah Bennett, a former Leverage employee who is now editor-in-chief for Palladium Magazine (LinkedIn ), was involved with a white nationalist email list, where he among other things made anti-Semetic jokes about a holocaust survivor, says he "always has illuminating conversations with Richard Spencer", and complained about someone being "pro-West before being pro-white/super far-right".
I have 35 mutual friends with this guy on Facebook, mostly EAs. This makes me think that while at Leverage he interacted a reasonable amount with the EA community. (Obviously, I expect my EA mutual friends to react with revulsion to this stuff.)
Bennett denies this connection; he says he was trying to make friends with these white nationalists in order to get information on them and white nationalism. I think it's plausible that this is somewhat true. In particular, I'd not be that surprised if Bennett is not a fan of Hitler, and if he said racist jokes more to fit in. But I'd be pretty surprised if it turned out that he didn't have endorsed explicitly racist views--this seems to be the simplest explanation of a bunch of his racist comments which seemed to come from a place of actual racism-based analysis.
I previously knew that Leverage has employed several neoreactionaries; I had perhaps naively assumed that they were mostly just contrarian intellectual types who say various edgy things and probably don't do much good for the world, but who are basically not explicitly racist as part of their endorsed values. The fact that Jonah seems to be racist in this way updates me towards thinking that the people he worked with in the past at Leverage who now work at Palladium might also be that racist, which makes me think that it's likely that Leverage at least for a while had a whole lot [EDIT: I no longer endorse this, see endnotes] of really racist employees. I think this is really sketchy and bad.
Suppose there's an org without much evidence of positive impact; how strong does the evidence of its white nationalist connection have to be before I decide to write it off? Personally I think the answer is "not very high"; I think the evidence in favor of Leverage's connections to white nationalism are above that low threshold.
Most hardcore EAs I know in person already think Leverage is pretty sketchy and think it's bad that they try to associate themselves with EA so much; I would like it if the wider community also had this perspective.
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Edited to add (Oct 08 2019): I wrote "which makes me think that it's likely that Leverage at least for a while had a whole lot of really racist employees." I think this was mistaken and I'm confused by why I wrote it. I endorse the claim "I think it's plausible Leverage had like five really racist employees". I feel pretty bad about this mistake and apologize to anyone harmed by it.
This aged well... and it reads like what ChatGPT would blurt, if you asked it to "sound like a convincingly respectful and calm cult with no real output." Your 'Anti-Avoidance,' in particular, is deliciously Orwellian. "You're just avoiding the truth, you're just confused..."
I was advocating algal and fish farming, including bubbling air into the water and sopping-up the fish poop with crabs and bivalves - back in 2003. Spent a few years trying to tell any marine biologist I could. Fish farming took-off, years later, and recently they realized you should b... (read more)