Geoff said in August 2018 that he imminently planned to write something:
My plan, apart from the post here, was to post something over the next month.
Since then, and after a long eight years, Leverage Research has disbanded. Do we have a postmortem on how Leverage has performed, so that similarly ambitious projects could learn from their experience?
Frankly, I’m unsure how much there is to learn from or about Leverage Research at this point. Having been in the effective altruism movement for almost as long as Leverage Research has been around, an organization which has had some kind of association with effective altruism since soon after it was founded, Leverage Research’s history is one of failed projects, many linked to the mismanagement of Leverage Research as an ecosystem of projects. In effective altruism, one of our goals is learning from mistakes, including the mistakes of others, is so we don’t make the same kind of mistakes ourselves. It’s usually more prudent to judge mistakes on a case-by-case basis, as opposed to the actor or agency that perpetuates them. Yet other times there is a common thread. When there is evidence for repeated failures borne of systematic errors in an organization’s operations and worldview, often the most prudent lesson we can learn from that organization is why they repeatedly and consistently failed, and about their environment, for why it enabled a culture of an organization barely ever course-correcting, or being receptive to feedback. What we might be able to learn from Leverage Research is how EA(-adjacent) organizations should not operate, and how effective altruism as a community can learn to interact with them better.
[Question] Did Geoff Anders ever write a post about the performance of Leverage Research and their recent disbanding?
Geoff said in August 2018 that he imminently planned to write something:
Since then, and after a long eight years, Leverage Research has disbanded. Do we have a postmortem on how Leverage has performed, so that similarly ambitious projects could learn from their experience?
Frankly, I’m unsure how much there is to learn from or about Leverage Research at this point. Having been in the effective altruism movement for almost as long as Leverage Research has been around, an organization which has had some kind of association with effective altruism since soon after it was founded, Leverage Research’s history is one of failed projects, many linked to the mismanagement of Leverage Research as an ecosystem of projects. In effective altruism, one of our goals is learning from mistakes, including the mistakes of others, is so we don’t make the same kind of mistakes ourselves. It’s usually more prudent to judge mistakes on a case-by-case basis, as opposed to the actor or agency that perpetuates them. Yet other times there is a common thread. When there is evidence for repeated failures borne of systematic errors in an organization’s operations and worldview, often the most prudent lesson we can learn from that organization is why they repeatedly and consistently failed, and about their environment, for why it enabled a culture of an organization barely ever course-correcting, or being receptive to feedback. What we might be able to learn from Leverage Research is how EA(-adjacent) organizations should not operate, and how effective altruism as a community can learn to interact with them better.