Using psychological techniques to experiment on one another, and on the “sociology” of the group itself, was a main purpose of the group. It was understood among members that they were signing up to be guinea pigs for experiments in introspection, altering one’s belief structure, and experimental group dynamics.
The Pareto program felt like it had substantial components of this type of social/psychological experimentation, but participants were not aware of this in advance and did not give informed consent. Some (maybe most?) Pareto fellows, including me, were not even aware that Leverage was involved in any way in running the program until they arrived, and found out they were going to be staying in the Leverage house.
CEA regards it as one of our mistakes that the Pareto Fellowship was a CEA program, but our senior management didn’t provide enough oversight of how the program was being run. To Beth and other participants or applicants who found it misleading or harmful in some way—we’re sorry.
Why doesn’t the mistake page say anything about Leverage being involved with the Pareto Fellowship? Is that a statement that this part wasn’t seen as a mistake?
There were ~20 Fellows, mostly undergrad-aged with one younger and a few older.
Stayed in Leverage house for ~3 months in summer 2016 and did various trainings followed by doing a project with mentorship to apply things learnt from trainings
Training was mostly based on Leverage ideas but also included fast-forward versions of CFAR workshop, 80k workshop. Some of the content was taught by Leverage staff and some by CEA staff who were very ‘in Leverage’s orbit’.
I think most fellows felt that it was really useful in various ways but also weird and sketchy and maybe harmful in various other ways.
Several fellows ended up working for Leverage afterwards; the whole thing felt like a bit of a recruiting drive.
The Pareto program felt like it had substantial components of this type of social/psychological experimentation, but participants were not aware of this in advance and did not give informed consent. Some (maybe most?) Pareto fellows, including me, were not even aware that Leverage was involved in any way in running the program until they arrived, and found out they were going to be staying in the Leverage house.
CEA regards it as one of our mistakes that the Pareto Fellowship was a CEA program, but our senior management didn’t provide enough oversight of how the program was being run. To Beth and other participants or applicants who found it misleading or harmful in some way—we’re sorry.
Why doesn’t the mistake page say anything about Leverage being involved with the Pareto Fellowship? Is that a statement that this part wasn’t seen as a mistake?
Sorry I missed this—we’re working on a couple of updates to the mistakes page, including about this. I can let you know once the new text is up.
The new text is finally up: https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes
Do you have a link for more description of the Pareto program?
The basic outline is:
There were ~20 Fellows, mostly undergrad-aged with one younger and a few older.
Stayed in Leverage house for ~3 months in summer 2016 and did various trainings followed by doing a project with mentorship to apply things learnt from trainings
Training was mostly based on Leverage ideas but also included fast-forward versions of CFAR workshop, 80k workshop. Some of the content was taught by Leverage staff and some by CEA staff who were very ‘in Leverage’s orbit’.
I think most fellows felt that it was really useful in various ways but also weird and sketchy and maybe harmful in various other ways.
Several fellows ended up working for Leverage afterwards; the whole thing felt like a bit of a recruiting drive.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161213021354/http://www.paretofellowship.org/ is the program’s self-description.