You know, I’m not necessarily a great backer of Leverage Research, especially some of its past projects, but I feel the level of criticism that it has faced relative to other organizations in the space is a bit bizarre. Many of the things that Leverage is criticized for (such as being secretive, seeing themselves at least in part as saving the world, investing in projects that look crazy to intelligent outsiders, etc.) in my view apply to many rationalist/EA organizations. This is not to say that those other organizations are wrong to do these things necessarily, just that it’s weird to me that people go after Leverage-in-particular for reasons that often don’t seem to be consistently applied to other projects in the space.
(I have never been an employee of Leverage Research, though at one point they were potentially interested in recruiting me and I was not interested; at another point I checked in re: potentially working there but didn’t like the sound of the projects they seemed to be recruiting for at the time.)
EDIT 10/13: My original comment was written before the Medium post from Zoe Curzi. The contents of that Medium post are very concerning to me and seem very unlike what I’ve encountered in other rationalist or EA organizations.
The new Medium post does imply that Leverage cannot be simply lumped with other EA/Rationalist orgs (I too haven’t heard anything that concerning reported of any other org), but I don’t think that invalidates your original point that the criticisms in this post, as written, could be levelled at many orgs. (I actually wrote such a damning-sounding list for LessWrong/Lightcone).
I agree, but I wanted to be clear that my original comment was largely in reply to the original post and in my view does not much apply to the Medium post, which I consider much more specific and concerning criticism.
My own strong agreement with the content makes it hard to debias my approval here, but I want to generally massively praise edits that explicitly cross out the existing comment, and state that they’ve changed their minds, and why they’ve done so.
(There are totally good reasons to retract without comment, of course, and I’m glad that LW now offers this option. I’m just giving Davis credit for putting his update out there like this.)
You know, I’m not necessarily a great backer of Leverage Research, especially some of its past projects, but I feel the level of criticism that it has faced relative to other organizations in the space is a bit bizarre. Many of the things that Leverage is criticized for (such as being secretive, seeing themselves at least in part as saving the world, investing in projects that look crazy to intelligent outsiders, etc.) in my view apply to many rationalist/EA organizations. This is not to say that those other organizations are wrong to do these things necessarily, just that it’s weird to me that people go after Leverage-in-particular for reasons that often don’t seem to be consistently applied to other projects in the space.(I have never been an employee of Leverage Research, though at one point they were potentially interested in recruiting me and I was not interested; at another point I checked in re: potentially working there but didn’t like the sound of the projects they seemed to be recruiting for at the time.)
EDIT 10/13: My original comment was written before the Medium post from Zoe Curzi. The contents of that Medium post are very concerning to me and seem very unlike what I’ve encountered in other rationalist or EA organizations.
The new Medium post does imply that Leverage cannot be simply lumped with other EA/Rationalist orgs (I too haven’t heard anything that concerning reported of any other org), but I don’t think that invalidates your original point that the criticisms in this post, as written, could be levelled at many orgs. (I actually wrote such a damning-sounding list for LessWrong/Lightcone).
I agree, but I wanted to be clear that my original comment was largely in reply to the original post and in my view does not much apply to the Medium post, which I consider much more specific and concerning criticism.
Entirely fair!
My own strong agreement with the content makes it hard to debias my approval here, but I want to generally massively praise edits that explicitly cross out the existing comment, and state that they’ve changed their minds, and why they’ve done so.
(There are totally good reasons to retract without comment, of course, and I’m glad that LW now offers this option. I’m just giving Davis credit for putting his update out there like this.)