“Did it take over the Centre for Effective Altruism?“
This seems false? (Depending on how you meant the framing.) My (unprofessional) read of the situation is that something closer to the inverse is true.
(Redacted a few comments because I work at CEA and this could be taken as more authoritative/official than it was meant to be. The info in those comments I already knew before I joined CEA.)
(Please correct me if I‘m wrong here, that’s just my impression from talking to people. And I‘ve talked to both Leverage and non-Leverage early EAs about this.)
The post itself seems like a good idea to me. I think most of the info is public (lots of threads on Twitter) and not hard to find.
(Edit: It also doesn’t seem true that “Leverage“ was organising EAGs & CEA so much as individual people who were into EA/CEA (like Kerry & Larissa) at some point started also being into Leverage. But epistemic status a bit unclear. Just my impression.)
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.)
Yeah, probably just slightly disagree with the word “takeover“ in Oliver‘s comment to some extent, but that seems like a reasonable linguistic disagreement. (If it’s not taken over for a significant amount of time, because then the other people kicked you out, it wasn’t much of a takeover. Maybe Oliver and me would arrive at “long/mid-term-unsuccessful-takeover“ as the concept we‘d both agree on. Also acknowledging that I wasn’t there at the time, and he was.)
Doesn’t change the fundamental point that it seems important to have some transparent documentation on this. Seems good.
“Did it take over the Centre for Effective Altruism?“
This seems false? (Depending on how you meant the framing.) My (unprofessional) read of the situation is that something closer to the inverse is true.
(Redacted a few comments because I work at CEA and this could be taken as more authoritative/official than it was meant to be. The info in those comments I already knew before I joined CEA.)
(Please correct me if I‘m wrong here, that’s just my impression from talking to people. And I‘ve talked to both Leverage and non-Leverage early EAs about this.)
The post itself seems like a good idea to me. I think most of the info is public (lots of threads on Twitter) and not hard to find.
(Edit: It also doesn’t seem true that “Leverage“ was organising EAGs & CEA so much as individual people who were into EA/CEA (like Kerry & Larissa) at some point started also being into Leverage. But epistemic status a bit unclear. Just my impression.)
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:
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.)
Yeah, probably just slightly disagree with the word “takeover“ in Oliver‘s comment to some extent, but that seems like a reasonable linguistic disagreement. (If it’s not taken over for a significant amount of time, because then the other people kicked you out, it wasn’t much of a takeover. Maybe Oliver and me would arrive at “long/mid-term-unsuccessful-takeover“ as the concept we‘d both agree on. Also acknowledging that I wasn’t there at the time, and he was.)
Doesn’t change the fundamental point that it seems important to have some transparent documentation on this. Seems good.
Calling it a “year-long takeover” would resolve the ambiguity.