Did Leverage Research take over the Centre for Effective Altruism permanently? Is it still in control to this day? No, of course not. No oneâs claiming that.
Did Leverage Research take over the Centre for Effective Altruism for some amount of time? Thatâs 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 doesnât mean they werenât at some point in control of the organization. For instance, Larissa Hesketh-Rowe stopped being CEO, but that doesnât mean she was never CEO in the first place. If someone loses or gives up a position of power, that doesnât 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 isnât necessary to write a great deep dive post.)
Yeah, probably just slightly disagree with the word âtakeoverâ in Oliverâs comment to some extent, but that seems like a reasonable linguistic disagreement. (If itâs not taken over for a significant amount of time, because then the other people kicked you out, it wasnât much of a takeover. Maybe Oliver and me would arrive at âlong/âmid-term-unsuccessful-takeoverâ as the concept weâd both agree on. Also acknowledging that I wasnât there at the time, and he was.)
Doesnât change the fundamental point that it seems important to have some transparent documentation on this. Seems good.
Did Leverage Research take over the Centre for Effective Altruism permanently? Is it still in control to this day? No, of course not. No oneâs claiming that.
Did Leverage Research take over the Centre for Effective Altruism for some amount of time? Thatâs how Oliver Habryka, who I believe worked at the CEA at some point during the 2010s, characterizes it:
If, as I understand, the Leverage Research people left the CEA sometime around 2019, that doesnât mean they werenât at some point in control of the organization. For instance, Larissa Hesketh-Rowe stopped being CEO, but that doesnât mean she was never CEO in the first place. If someone loses or gives up a position of power, that doesnât 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 isnât necessary to write a great deep dive post.)
Yeah, probably just slightly disagree with the word âtakeoverâ in Oliverâs comment to some extent, but that seems like a reasonable linguistic disagreement. (If itâs not taken over for a significant amount of time, because then the other people kicked you out, it wasnât much of a takeover. Maybe Oliver and me would arrive at âlong/âmid-term-unsuccessful-takeoverâ as the concept weâd both agree on. Also acknowledging that I wasnât there at the time, and he was.)
Doesnât change the fundamental point that it seems important to have some transparent documentation on this. Seems good.
Calling it a âyear-long takeoverâ would resolve the ambiguity.