A few months (maybe up to 9 months, but could be as little as 1 month, I don’t remember the timing) before Larissa had to leave CEA, a friend and I talked to a competent-seeming CEA staff member who was about to leave the org (or had recently left – I don’t remember details) because the org seemed like a mess and had bad leadership. I’m not sure if Leverage was mentioned there – I could imagine that it was, but I don’t remember details and my most salient memory is that I thought of it as “not good leadership for CEA.” My friend and I encouraged them to stay and speak up to try to change leadership, but the person had enough for the time being or had some other reason to leave (again, I don’t remember details). Anyway, this person left CEA at the time without a plan to voice their view that the org was in a bad state. I don’t know if they gave an exit interview or deliberately sought out trustees or if they talked to friends or whether they said nothing at all – I didn’t stay in touch. However, I do remember that my friend discussed if maybe we should at some point get back this former CEA staff person and encourage them again to find out if there are more former colleagues who are dissatisfied and if we could cause a wave of change at CEA. We were so far removed and had so few contacts to anyone who actually worked there that it would’ve been a bit silly for us to get involved in this. And I’m not saying we would’ve done it – it’s easy to talk about stuff like that, but then usually you don’t do anything. Still, I feel like this anecdote suggests that there are sometimes more people interested and invested in good community outcomes than one might think, and multiple pathways to beneficial leadership change (like, it’s very possible this former staff had nothing to do with the eventual chain of causes that led to leadership change, and that means that multiple groups of people were expressing worried sentiments about CEA at that time independently).
At one point somewhere between 2017-2018, someone influential in EA encouraged me to share more about specific stuff that happened in the EA orgs I worked because they were sometimes talking to other people who are “also interested in the health of EA orgs / health of the EA community.” (To avoid confusion, this was not the community health team.) This suggests that people somewhat systematically keep an eye on things and even if CEA were to get temporarily taken over by a Silicon Valley cultish community, probably someone would try to do something about it eventually. (Even if it’s just writing an EA forum post to create common knowledge that a specific is now taken over and no longer similar to what it was when it was founded. I mean, we see that posts did eventually get written about Leverage, for instance, and the main reasons it didn’t happen earlier are probably more because many people thought “oh, everyone knows already” and “like anywhere else, few people actually take the time to do community-useful small bits of work when you can just wait for someone else to do it.”)
Interesting; I didn’t remember this about Tara.
Two data points in the other direction:
A few months (maybe up to 9 months, but could be as little as 1 month, I don’t remember the timing) before Larissa had to leave CEA, a friend and I talked to a competent-seeming CEA staff member who was about to leave the org (or had recently left – I don’t remember details) because the org seemed like a mess and had bad leadership. I’m not sure if Leverage was mentioned there – I could imagine that it was, but I don’t remember details and my most salient memory is that I thought of it as “not good leadership for CEA.” My friend and I encouraged them to stay and speak up to try to change leadership, but the person had enough for the time being or had some other reason to leave (again, I don’t remember details). Anyway, this person left CEA at the time without a plan to voice their view that the org was in a bad state. I don’t know if they gave an exit interview or deliberately sought out trustees or if they talked to friends or whether they said nothing at all – I didn’t stay in touch. However, I do remember that my friend discussed if maybe we should at some point get back this former CEA staff person and encourage them again to find out if there are more former colleagues who are dissatisfied and if we could cause a wave of change at CEA. We were so far removed and had so few contacts to anyone who actually worked there that it would’ve been a bit silly for us to get involved in this. And I’m not saying we would’ve done it – it’s easy to talk about stuff like that, but then usually you don’t do anything. Still, I feel like this anecdote suggests that there are sometimes more people interested and invested in good community outcomes than one might think, and multiple pathways to beneficial leadership change (like, it’s very possible this former staff had nothing to do with the eventual chain of causes that led to leadership change, and that means that multiple groups of people were expressing worried sentiments about CEA at that time independently).
At one point somewhere between 2017-2018, someone influential in EA encouraged me to share more about specific stuff that happened in the EA orgs I worked because they were sometimes talking to other people who are “also interested in the health of EA orgs / health of the EA community.” (To avoid confusion, this was not the community health team.) This suggests that people somewhat systematically keep an eye on things and even if CEA were to get temporarily taken over by a Silicon Valley cultish community, probably someone would try to do something about it eventually. (Even if it’s just writing an EA forum post to create common knowledge that a specific is now taken over and no longer similar to what it was when it was founded. I mean, we see that posts did eventually get written about Leverage, for instance, and the main reasons it didn’t happen earlier are probably more because many people thought “oh, everyone knows already” and “like anywhere else, few people actually take the time to do community-useful small bits of work when you can just wait for someone else to do it.”)