Yarrow Bouchard 🔸
Bio
I got interested in effective altruism back before it was called effective altruism, back before Giving What We Can had a website. Later on, I got involved in my university EA group and helped run it for a few years. I joined the Effective Altruism Forum to try to figure out where effective altruism could fit into my life these days and what it means to me. You can read my latest thoughts on effective altruism here.
I write on Substack, and used to write on Medium.
Pronouns: she/her or they/them.
Posts 33
Comments762
Topic contributions13
Update:
The two paragraphs of this post about Leverage Research stimulated the most reaction because apparently a lot of people in EA are not aware of the history of Leverage Research's involvement in EA. Or because they're not aware that Leverage Research is a cult (or cult-like group, if you prefer).
If you're reading this, you can help by a) writing a deep dive post on Leverage Research's involvement in EA, b) asking someone you know if they would write one, or c) offering payment or a cash incentive for someone to write one. More details here.
People do talk about Leverage - that is how you know about them
The sense in which this is true is the sense in which I did not claim otherwise. In the sense in which I claimed otherwise, this is false.
When people say "nobody talks about this", they obviously don't mean literally nobody has ever talked about it. This is just a misunderstanding of ordinary language. Surely you understand the meaning of this phrase?
I don't understand why people leave comments like this. How does it help? How does it settle anything? I don't want to engage with this kind of non-substantive, hyper-literal semantic nitpicking. I'm going to try to resist the temptation to engage further with these kinds of comments if I see them.
It might be worse for EA than FTX that the EA community is so often just so unpleasant to interact with. People inside the EA bubble seem unaware of how they come across to people outside it (or they don't care, or they find they can't change their behaviour even if they want to).
Also, the EA Forum should implement a block feature. It would make the forum more usable.
Did Leverage Research take over the Centre for Effective Altruism permanently? Is it still in control to this day? No, of course not. No one's claiming that.
Did Leverage Research take over the Centre for Effective Altruism for some amount of time? That's how Oliver Habryka, who I believe worked at the CEA at some point during the 2010s, characterizes it:
I will again remind people that Leverage at some point had approximately succeeded at a corporate takeover of CEA, placing both the CEO and their second-in-command in the organization. They really were not very peripheral to EA, they were just covert about it.
If, as I understand, the Leverage Research people left the CEA sometime around 2019, that doesn't mean they weren't at some point in control of the organization. For instance, Larissa Hesketh-Rowe stopped being CEO, but that doesn't mean she was never CEO in the first place. If someone loses or gives up a position of power, that doesn't mean they never had it.
It would be great to get a fuller and more detailed picture on what happened. Thanks for pointing out that a lot of public info is on Twitter. Someone could probably write a pretty deep post only using public info. (Going above and beyond would be talking to sources and getting new info, but that probably isn't necessary to write a great deep dive post.)
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.
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.
Of course, the terminology I’m actually advocating is EA 1.0 and EA 2.0. I noticed that Daniel Frank (a board member of Giving What We Can Canada) already used this terminology in a post back in 2022. I also noticed one or two examples of other people using it organically.
To be clear, I didn’t come up with this terminology myself.
I think it should be fairly uncontroversial to say that the late 2000s, early 2010s version of EA focused almost exclusively on global poverty can be called EA 1.0. And that the late 2010s and 2020s version of EA focused largely on AGI safety, longtermism, and existential risk can be called EA 2.0. I think people generally agree that an important change happened, regardless of whether they think the change is good or bad.