Suggestion: Leverage Research deep dive
Someone (other than me) should write a deep-dive post about the cult Leverage Research and its infiltration of effective altruism.
The story, in brief:
- Leverage Research is a cult.
- Leverage Research organized the first EA Summit in 2013 and the second EA Summit in 2014. The EA Summits were the first effective altruism conferences of any kind.
- Leverage Research also helped to organize the first EA Global conferences, which began in 2015 and continue to this day.
- In 2016, a major EA program, the Pareto Fellowship, was run largely by Leverage Research. There is some evidence the Pareto Fellowship was run in a cult-like fashion.
- Leverage Research eventually gained full control of the Centre for Effective Altruism in 2018 when one of its members, Larissa Hesketh-Rowe, became the CEO.
The purpose of the deep-dive post would be for people in EA to understand the truth about what happened. And to learn whatever lessons they think they should learn from that.
These are the questions I would recommend asking and attempting to answer in the deep-dive post:
- Is Leverage Research a cult?
- Did it take over the Centre for Effective Altruism?
- Did it organize the EA Summits and the Pareto Fellowship? Did it play an important role in organizing the first EA Globals?
- If so, how could the EA movement, particularly the core international leadership, let this happen?
- If so, what might be the broader ramifications of this for the EA movement?
- What (if anything) is there to learn from this?
I don’t know what the chances would be of actually getting funded, but someone who wanted to spend a lot of time investigating this topic could apply for a $1,000+ grant from the EA Infrastructure Fund.
I’m not sure if Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) would even consider funding something so small and so specific to EA community self-reflection, but you can look at the relevant info here.

Invitation for bets
I’m willing to bet that Anthropic’s revenue growth over the next year will be slower than its revenue growth over the last 3 years. I proposed a specific bet here. Anyone who wants can offer to take the other side of that bet. Or you can make a counteroffer.
I’m also willing to make a longer-term bet that the AI industry is in a bubble. I proposed a specific bet for that, too, here. Feel free to offer to take the other side of that bet or make a counteroffer.
I’d also be open to other bets. It seems pointless to bet about whether AGI or transformative AI will be deployed within the next 5-10 years, yet, for the heck of it, I would agree to a bet against that, too. (I’ll make bets for small, nominal amounts of money to be donated to the winner’s charity of choice, since the practical and legal problems with betting are too large otherwise.)
I’d also bet against the deployment of 100,000+ SAE Level 5 fully autonomous vehicles in North America within the next 3 years, if anyone has a strong opinion on that. I’d make a similar bet against the deployment of autonomous humanoid robots in North American households, although we’d have to come up with some specific resolution criteria.
Similarly, I’d bet against any significant level of near-term labour automation by LLMs or generative AI. Or against LLMs becoming capable of performing all sorts of specific tasks well.
On any of these topics, I’m also open to invitations for a public dialogue. (More on that topic here.)
Hi Yarrow,
Missed your reply in the other thread. I'll accept this bet, with $20 to the charity of the winner's choice. With the modification that since by 2027 Anthropic will probably be a public company that reports quarterly revenue every quarter instead of annualized revenue on an irregular schedule, $50 billion in revenue in calendar Q2 2027 would also count.
I think I'd put a ~60-70% chance that Anthropic exceeds this threshold.
Thanks, Josh. If Anthropic completes its IPO by then, that would be a convenient way to get reliable revenue reporting. Let me double check the math later when I have a chance and confirm. I want to make sure I did the extrapolation correctly.
This should be fairly realisable as a short on NVIDIA, may I ask why you’d prefer a bet?
The bet would only be for a nominal amount of money (e.g., $20) to the charity of the winner’s choice. The purpose of the bet is not to make money but for people to publicly state and commit to specific, dated predictions with firm resolution criteria.
This is the same philosophy behind longbets.org (a project of the Long Now Foundation), whose winnings all go to the charity of the winner’s choice. The minimum you can bet there is $200. Long Bets has been around since 2002, and the first bet is about AGI: https://longbets.org/1/
Bets for large sums of money not for charity are not legally enforceable (and possibly, but not necessarily, technically illegal, depending on jurisdiction), so the money involved is always theoretical anyway.
I often hear the suggestion that people should short stock when they don't believe in a company. I don't think that it is a very good piece of advice.
Shorting is notoriously difficult and carries the possibility of unlimited loss. Even if you believe that a stock will crash, small errors such as timing the crash one year too early or using a miscalculated stop order to stop shorting too early can lead to massive losses. Determining the actual risk involved is not very straightforward. Shorting is often accompanied by risk-managing tactics such as hedging that also require careful considerations.
Due to all this, even if you believe a stock is going to crash, shorting is usually a bad idea. Basically, the skillset required to short properly is different from the skills used to predict whether or not AI will succeed commercially or not. An expert in AI can do the latter prediction, but the former requires you to also be specialized in complex investments. If you are "only" an AI expert, bets offer a much more managed risk profile.
Post this on LW and youll prob get more offers
Feel free to cross-post it! You have my permission! (My LessWrong account has been deactivated for years and I’m not going to reactivate it for this.)