Yarrow Bouchard 🔸

Karma: 1,485

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.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 7 Jun 2026 20:02 UTC
−6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EA 1.0 vs. EA 2.0
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.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 7 Jun 2026 19:37 UTC
−3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: EA 1.0 vs. EA 2.0

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.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 7 Jun 2026 17:46 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jonathan Mannhart’s comment on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
Calling it a “year-long takeover” would resolve the ambiguity.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 7 Jun 2026 17:25 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Jonathan Mannhart’s comment on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
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.)

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 6 Jun 2026 19:56 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Noah Birnbaum’s comment on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
Feel free to cross-post it! You have my permission! (My LessWrong account has been deactivated for years and I’m not going to reactivate it for this.)

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 6 Jun 2026 12:42 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: JoshYou’s comment on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
Thanks, Josh. If Anthropic completes its IPO by then, that would be a convenient way to get reliable revenue reporting. Let me double check the math later when I have a chance and confirm. I want to make sure I did the extrapolation correctly.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 6 Jun 2026 12:08 UTC
6 points
4 ∶ 2
on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
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.
What links here?
- EA 1.0 vs. EA 2.0 by Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 (4 Jun 2026 20:15 UTC; -14 points)

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 6 Jun 2026 11:54 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: huw’s comment on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
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.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 5 Jun 2026 16:35 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: EA 1.0 vs. EA 2.0
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.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 5 Jun 2026 16:23 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: James Herbert’s comment on: EA 1.0 vs. EA 2.0
Thanks.

I assume everyone who has donated to Stop AI, supported it, or been involved was shocked and horrified by Sam Kirchner’s threats to murder people. I can’t imagine anyone supported that.

Nothing I said was intended to imply that anyone who has supported Stop AI supported Sam Kirchner’s threats. It was just to establish that there is a meaningful connection between Stop AI and EA — that Stop AI is “in EA’s orbit”.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 5 Jun 2026 16:19 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Greg_Colbourn ⏸️ ’s comment on: EA 1.0 vs. EA 2.0
I don’t believe Stop AI expelled Sam Kirchner. I think he resigned. After Sam Kirchner threatened to commit a mass shooting at OpenAI, a few people on the EA Forum expressed concern about what Stop AI said about it.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 5 Jun 2026 16:14 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tristan Katz’s comment on: EA 1.0 vs. EA 2.0
Someone should write a separate deep-dive post about Leverage Research and its infiltration of EA. (Although you’d be able to get a lot the same information just by reading the sources I cited.) A lot of people in EA are unaware of this story, but it’s important. It’s not exactly super secret or hidden — there seems to be general agreement that Leverage Research is a cult and the Centre for Effective Altruism describes its history with Leverage Research on its website under its “Mistakes we’ve made” page — yet people in EA don’t talk about it.

Maybe you could investigate the topic for yourself and write a deep dive post on it. Maybe someone else could.

The key thing is for people in EA to understand the truth about what happened. And to learn whatever lessons they think they should learn from that.

I’m a bit numb to procedural or formalistic critiques at this point because they always seem to just end up being another way to express substantive disagreement. It’s not like the EA community actually follows the writing and sourcing norms you’re advocating here.

The important thing is the substantive questions:
- 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?
- What (if anything) is there to learn from this?
Similarly:
- Are there multiple cults (or cult-like groups) that have emerged from or been associated with the LessWrong community (rationalist community)?
- If so, why?
- Is the threat of a Stop AI co-founder to commit a mass shooting a concern for EA?
- If so, what could EA do in response? For instance, what could EA do to discourage extremist beliefs and behaviour, particularly violent behaviour?
- Does any of this point to deeper concerns with EA? Is it just a string of bad luck, or is there something more here?
- If it’s not just bad luck, what could be done better in the future?

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 4 Jun 2026 22:47 UTC
−2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Hugh P’s comment on: EA 1.0 vs. EA 2.0
Yes. It could just be a coincidence. But I don’t think it’s just a coincidence. I think the lack of critical thinking and lack of good norms you need to let a cult take over your movement is a bad sign, and may predict bad things to come. Particularly if there isn’t an adequately large post-mortem, an adequate attempt to reckon with such a catastrophic mistake, such a catastrophic failure, and learn deep lessons from it.
This risks going down a rabbit hole, but I think one of the systemic problems with the EA movement is a consistent failure to do good post-mortems. (And while we’re at it, good pre-mortems would probably help too.) Many movements, organizations, groups, individuals, etc. experience big failures. Sometimes they learn from them and turn things around. Sometimes they don’t. There are several instances such as the Leverage Research infiltration, the Manifest racism scandal, and even the collapse of FTX where I think EA had opportunities to learn hard lessons and do things better in the future, but didn’t.
But, of course, I can’t prove any of this. It’s all just my opinion.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 4 Jun 2026 22:33 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: dan.pandori’s comment on: EA 1.0 vs. EA 2.0
But longtermism doesn’t necessarily include AI safety, since many advocates of AI safety are not longtermists. If you think there’s a 50%+ chance of superintelligence within a decade and a 5%+ chance of human extinction if superintelligence is created, you don’t have to be concerned at all with anything that might happen 1,000+ years from now to treat that as an urgent priority.

In 2021, Will MacAskill, who coined the term longtermism, defined longtermism like this:

Longtermism is the view that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time.

In the introduction to the 2025 anthology Essays on Longtermism, Hillary Greaves, Jacob Barrett, and David Thorstad cite that definition from Will MacAskill. They also characterize longtermism like this:

A cluster of ideas going under the label ‘longtermism’ hold that considerations of the far future—on timescales of thousands, millions, or even billions of years—are highly significant for today’s decision-making.

Not all AI safety advocates are longtermists. Some are concerned with what will happen within the next 100 years and don’t really think or care that much about the future 1,000+ years from now.

To accurately break down the EA 1.0 vs. EA 2.0 distinction by cause area, it would have to be something convoluted like: global health and development + animal welfare vs. AI safety + longtermism.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 4 Jun 2026 22:11 UTC
−4 points
0 ∶ 3
in reply to: Tristan Katz’s comment on: EA 1.0 vs. EA 2.0
The post uses hyperlink citations. When a word or phrase is hyperlinked, that’s a citation. You can open the links and see the evidence for yourself.

For example, I cited this comment from Oliver Habryka, who worked for the Centre for Effective Altruism during the 2010s:

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.

I cited Zoe Curzi’s account of her time at Leverage Research, which supports its characterization as a cult. I also cited the Centre for Effective Altruism’s webpage which documents some of its historical relationship with Leverage Research, and notes that Leverage Research organized the EA Summit conferences and the Pareto Fellowship. An additional citation in the post is an EA Forum comment (with a reply corroborating it) that describes cult-like behaviour during the interview process for the Pareto Fellowship.

I’ve actually never heard anyone in EA either a) deny that Leverage Research is a cult or b) deny that it was deeply involved in EA and the CEA, although maybe some people do deny one or both of those things. I don’t necessarily have my finger on the pulse.

By in EA’s orbit, I mean, e.g., that if Stop AI’s co-founder, Sam Kirchner, had committed a mass shooting at OpenAI (like he said he wanted to do) some of the Stop AI money — which the co-founder wanted to use to buy high-powered weapons and ammo, but was prevented from doing by other people at Stop AI — that bought those guns and those bullets that massacred people in the OpenAI offices might have been, in part, donated by people in the EA community who thought they were donating to an EA-aligned organization in an EA cause area (AI safety).

A 2024 GoFundMe fundraiser by Stop AI raised $9,111. Among the publicly listed donors is Stijn Bruers, who donated $578. His LinkedIn says he was the president of Effective Altruism Belgium for 8 years. Stijn Bruers has also been on the EA Forum since 2015 and has 1075 karma. So, we can confirm that Stop AI has been, in some part, funded by donations from people in the EA community.

A day after OpenAI’s offices were locked down in response to the threat from the Stop AI co-founder, a post on the EA Forum debated whether to donate to Stop AI. It ultimately decided against, but not for the reason that Stop AI is likely to be too extremist or might end up killing people. Just that the evidence for the efficacy of its tactics is not strong enough. (I assume this post was written and published before the author heard the news about Stop AI.)

More evidence about Stop AI’s connection to EA: another Stop AI member, Remmelt Ellen, has posted 86 times on the EA Forum since 2017, commented 280 times, and has 1439 karma. According to his LinkedIn, he co-founded Effective Altruism Netherlands in 2017. His EA Forum profile and his LinkedIn also say he’s had a major role at an EA project called AI Safety Camp, which has in part been funded by Effective Altruism Funds and the FTX Future Fund. Apparently one of Remmelt Ellen’s roles at AI Safety Camp has been to work on “Stop/Pause AI projects”, but I don’t know what connection (if any) that has with the organization Stop AI (with which he is involved). Stop AI is a splinter group off of PauseAI, which has a more prominent place in the EA community and on the EA Forum.

Here’s a positive EA Forum comment about Stop AI from Greg Colbourn. Greg Colbourn created the EA Hotel. He’s been on the EA Forum since 2014 and has 5972 karma. Greg Colbourn has also made a number of positive tweets about Stop AI: example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4.

Is this enough evidence to establish a meaningful connection between EA and Stop AI? I think so, but you may disagree.

The Zizians did not come from EA directly, but they came from the LessWrong community. There is so much overlap between EA and the LessWrong community these days that the distinction between the two is porous. The lead sentence of the Wikipedia article on the Zizians describes them like this:

The Zizians are an informal group of rationalists allegedly involved in six violent deaths in the United States, three in 2022 and three in 2025.

The Wikipedia article on the rationalist community (or LessWrong community) describes the Zizians as a “splinter group” off of the rationalist community.

Whether that’s “in EA’s orbit” or what the phrase “in EA’s orbit” means is something you can feel free to disagree with me on. Would it have been better if I said “adjacent to EA” or “only one or two degrees separated from EA”? The core point is that Leverage Research was not just a totally random, out-of-the-blue fluke. New groups with extreme views and violent behaviours are still not that far separated from EA. This is not normal and doesn’t typically happen.

Note (2026-06-05 at 00:56 UTC): I made substantial edits to this comment after posting. Use the Wayback Machine to see version history.
What links here?
- EA 1.0 vs. EA 2.0 by Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 (4 Jun 2026 20:15 UTC; -14 points)

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 4 Jun 2026 22:05 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: simon’s comment on: EA 1.0 vs. EA 2.0
Okay, so I’m advocating two things. The first is a new piece of terminology. The second is online discussion spaces oriented around EA 1.0 (and not EA 2.0).

If people can articulate the distinction better by having this terminology, it might mean people talk past each other less, which might mean they have fewer frustrating discussions where neither person feels like they’re getting their point across. In that way, making the distinction could help people get along better rather than worse.

I’m totally against echo chambers, but the EA Forum is mostly an EA 2.0 echo chamber and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. I think there should be EA 1.0 spaces for discussion that make room for all the pro-EA 1.0 and anti-EA 2.0 conversations that can’t happen on the EA Forum. You risking winding up in just another echo chamber if you do that, so it will be up to whoever gets involved to make sure that doesn’t happen. And if people who prefer EA 1.0 want to engage with EA 2.0 discourse, the EA Forum will still be around for them to do it.

EA 1.0 vs. EA 2.0

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸4 Jun 2026 20:15 UTC

−14 points

20 comments4 min readEA link

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 3 Jun 2026 23:04 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: EA organizations should pay experts to peer review their paper drafts and research proposals
The philosopher David Thorstad has an exemplary post on peer review, with strong evidence and arguments for its effectiveness — both as a means of increasing research quality and as a means of persuasion of expert communities.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 3 Jun 2026 20:30 UTC
27 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
Invitation for bets
I’m willing to bet that Anthropic’s revenue growth over the next year will be slower than its revenue growth over the last 3 years. I proposed a specific bet here. Anyone who wants can offer to take the other side of that bet. Or you can make a counteroffer.
I’m also willing to make a longer-term bet that the AI industry is in a bubble. I proposed a specific bet for that, too, here. Feel free to offer to take the other side of that bet or make a counteroffer.
I’d also be open to other bets. It seems pointless to bet about whether AGI or transformative AI will be deployed within the next 5-10 years, yet, for the heck of it, I would agree to a bet against that, too. (I’ll make bets for small, nominal amounts of money to be donated to the winner’s charity of choice, since the practical and legal problems with betting are too large otherwise.)
I’d also bet against the deployment of 100,000+ SAE Level 5 fully autonomous vehicles in North America within the next 3 years, if anyone has a strong opinion on that. I’d make a similar bet against the deployment of autonomous humanoid robots in North American households, although we’d have to come up with some specific resolution criteria.
Similarly, I’d bet against any significant level of near-term labour automation by LLMs or generative AI. Or against LLMs becoming capable of performing all sorts of specific tasks well.
On any of these topics, I’m also open to invitations for a public dialogue. (More on that topic here.)

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 2 Jun 2026 16:23 UTC
0 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: EA organizations should pay experts to peer review their paper drafts and research proposals
Why did the EA organizations find it disappointing? I’m afraid you’re going to say they didn’t like that peer reviewers didn’t agree with them, and therefore they decided the peer reviewers were wrong, and peer review is a waste of time.

Not all EA organizations are consistently producing high-quality work. That’s part of the problem. For instance, the problems with the METR time horizons graph are numerous and severe. Many of them were entirely avoidable, and should have at least been better disclosed. I can’t get over that most of the longer tasks, on which the 2025 segment of the graph depends, don’t have empirically measured human baselines. The baselines are just guesses by the authors. Surely if you don’t even bother to measure data that doesn’t qualify as high-quality? This also wasn’t disclosed until 2026 — a major omission.

What I would recommend to people at this point is to not believe any of METR’s claims, research, or analysis going forward unless and until it can be independently verified by a reliable source. You don’t know if METR’s data is data or just guesstimates. You don’t know that the typical best practices of scientific research have been followed. You don’t know that flaws or shortcomings or limitations that METR is aware of will be disclosed with sufficient emphasis, consistently across all communications.

Very few people outside of EA consider EA’s idiosyncratic ideas to be serious and credible. What is the strategy for gaining credibility outside the EA echo chamber? Right now, it seems to be a media strategy that counts on people not fact checking EA’s messaging. This could work — a lot of misinformation misleads a lot of people a lot of the time — but it also might rightly damage EA’s reputation if people eventually learn EA is not telling them the truth. It’s a risky strategy that depends on being able to fool people, rather than intellectually convince them.

80,000 Hours’ abysmal video on AI 2027 is an example of this. It misinforms its audience about AI experts’ views and insinuates there is a consensus in support of AI 2027’s core claims that doesn’t exist. Either 80,000 Hours knew this and misled its audience anyway, or it didn’t do a proper fact check of its script before producing the video. I was a lifelong fan of 80,000 Hours until that video. Now I no longer trust 80,000 Hours about anything. Not even career advice. I was in the top 1% or 0.1% of biggest supporters of 80,000 Hours. Now I’ve been completely polarized in the opposite direction. This is anecdotal, but, also, most people become angry when they feel as if they’ve been misled. It’s not a stretch to think this strategy could really blow up in an ugly way.

In my opinion, EA is aggressively burning down its reputation and risks being correctly labelled as a purveyor of misinformation. Steps should be taken to at least stop the bleeding.

I don’t know for sure that peer review would help move idiosyncratic EA ideas outside the EA echo chamber. I also don’t know that there isn’t a better strategy for doing so. It just seems like a good idea to me.

The economist Tyler Cowen was actually the first person who I heard suggest this. I believe he was talking about AGI/AGI safety. It was on a podcast, either his or someone else’s. I remember he said: publish, publish, publish.

The provider I originally mentioned in this post definitely looks like a shady company that I definitely wouldn’t recommend. I was wrong to mention that company and, in retrospect, the signs were obvious that it wasn’t a trustworthy company. I only gave it a few cursory glances. I’m grateful to Clara for giving it a second look and realizing that both Google Gemini 3.1 Pro (with “Extended thinking”) and I had been duped by some devious SEO.

The trustworthiness of that provider — or indeed any similar company offering a convenient, off-the-shelf service — is beside the point of whether peer review is a good idea or not. There are scam companies selling fake Ozempic online. That has nothing to do with whether genuine Ozempic is a good drug or not.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸

Suggestion: Leverage Research deep dive

EA 1.0 vs. EA 2.0

Invitation for bets