I have a large number of negative Leverage experiences between 2015-2017 that I never wrote up due to various complicated adversarial dynamics surrounding Leverage and CEA (as well as various NDAs and legal threats, made by both Leverage and CEA, not leveled at me, but leveled at enough people around me that I thought I might cause someone serious legal trouble if I repeat a thing I heard somewhere in a more public setting)
I’m getting a bit pedantic, but I wouldn’t gloss this as “CEA used legal threats to cover up Leverage related information”. Partly because the original bit is vague, but also because “cover up” implies that the goal is to hide information.
For example, imagine companies A and B sue each other, which ends up with them settling and signing an NDA. Company A might accept an NDA because they want to move on from the suit and agreeing to an NDA does that most effectively. I would not describe this as company A using legal threats to cover up B-related information.
In the timeframe CEA and Leverage where doing together the Pareto Fellowship. If you read the common knowledge post you find people finding that they were mislead by CEA because the announcement didn’t mention that the Pareto Fellowship was largely run by Leverage.
On their mistakes page CEA, they have a section about the Pareto Fellowship but it hides the fact that Leverage was involved in the Pareto Fellowship but says “The Pareto Fellowship was a program sponsored by CEA and run by two CEA staff, designed to deepen the EA involvement of promising students or people early in their careers.”
That does look to me like hiding information about the cooperation between Leverage and CEA.
I do think that publically presuming that people who hide information have something to hide is useful. If there’s nothing to hide I’d love to know what happened back then or who thinks what happened should stay hidden. At the minimum I do think that CEA witholding the information that the people who went to their programs spend their time in what now appears to be a cult is something that CEA should be open about in their mistakes page.
Yep, I think CEA has in the past straightforwardly misrepresented (there is a talk on the history of EA by Will and Toby that says some really dubious things here, IIRC) and sometimes even lied in order to not mention Leverage’s history with Effective Altruism. I think this was bad, and continues to be bad.
My initial thought on reading this was ‘this seems obviously bad’, and I assumed this was done to shield CEA from reputational risk.
Thinking about it more, I could imagine an epistemic state I’d be much more sympathetic to: ‘We suspect Leverage is a dangerous cult, but we don’t have enough shareable evidence to make that case convincingly to others, or we aren’t sufficiently confident ourselves. Crediting Leverage for stuff like the EA Summit (without acknowledging our concerns and criticisms) will sound like an endorsement of Leverage, which might cause others to be drawn into its orbit and suffer harm. But we don’t feel confident enough to feel comfortable tarring Leverage in public, or our evidence was shared in confidence and we can’t say anything we expect others to find convincing. So we’ll have to just steer clear of the topic for now.’
Still seems better to just not address the subject if you don’t want to give a fully accurate account of it. You don’t have to give talks on the history of EA!
I think the epistemic state of CEA was some mixture of something pretty close to what you list here, and something that I would put closer to something more like “Leverage maybe is bad, or maybe isn’t, but in any case it looks bad, and I don’t think I want people to think EA or CEA is bad, so we are going to try to avoid any associations between these entities, which will sometimes require stretching the truth”.
“Leverage maybe is bad, or maybe isn’t, but in any case it looks bad, and I don’t think I want people to think EA or CEA is bad, so we are going to try to avoid any associations between these entities, which will sometimes require stretching the truth”
That has the collary: “We don’t expect EA’s to care enough about the truth/being transparent that this is a huge reputational risk for us.”
It does look weird to me that CEA doesn’t include this on the mistakes page when they talk about Pareto. I just sent CEA an email to ask:
Hi CEA,
On https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes I see “The Pareto Fellowship was a program sponsored by CEA and run by two CEA staff, designed to deepen the EA involvement of promising students or people early in their careers. We realized during and after the program that senior management did not provide enough oversight of the program. For example, reports by some applicants indicate that the interview process was unprofessional and made them deeply uncomfortable.”
Is there a reason that the mistakes page does not mention the involvement of Leverage in the Pareto Fellowship? [1]
Yep, I think the situation is closer to what Jeff describes here, though, I honestly don’t actually know, since people tend to get cagey when the topic comes up.
I talked with Geoff and according to him there’s no legal contract between CEA and Leverage that prevents information sharing. All information sharing is prevented by organization internal NDA’s.
Huh, that’s surprising, if by that he means “no contracts between anyone currently at Leverage and anyone at CEA”. I currently still think it’s the case, though I also don’t see any reason for Geoff to lie here. Maybe there is some technical sense in which there is no contract between Leverage and CEA, but there are contracts between current Leverage employees, who used to work at CEA, and current CEA employees?
What he said is compatible with Ex-CEA people still being bound by the NDA’s they signed they were at CEA. I don’t think anything happened that releases ex-CEA people from NDAs.
The important thing is that CEA is responsible for those NDA and is free to unilaterally lift them if they would have an interest in the free flow of information. In the case of a settlement with contracts between the two organisations CEA couldn’t unilaterally lift the settlement contract.
Public pressure on CEA seems to be necessary to get the information out in the open.
Link? I’m not finding it
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=zqcynfzfKma6QKMK9
I think what you’re pointing to is:
I’m getting a bit pedantic, but I wouldn’t gloss this as “CEA used legal threats to cover up Leverage related information”. Partly because the original bit is vague, but also because “cover up” implies that the goal is to hide information.
For example, imagine companies A and B sue each other, which ends up with them settling and signing an NDA. Company A might accept an NDA because they want to move on from the suit and agreeing to an NDA does that most effectively. I would not describe this as company A using legal threats to cover up B-related information.
In the timeframe CEA and Leverage where doing together the Pareto Fellowship. If you read the common knowledge post you find people finding that they were mislead by CEA because the announcement didn’t mention that the Pareto Fellowship was largely run by Leverage.
On their mistakes page CEA, they have a section about the Pareto Fellowship but it hides the fact that Leverage was involved in the Pareto Fellowship but says “The Pareto Fellowship was a program sponsored by CEA and run by two CEA staff, designed to deepen the EA involvement of promising students or people early in their careers.”
That does look to me like hiding information about the cooperation between Leverage and CEA.
I do think that publically presuming that people who hide information have something to hide is useful. If there’s nothing to hide I’d love to know what happened back then or who thinks what happened should stay hidden. At the minimum I do think that CEA witholding the information that the people who went to their programs spend their time in what now appears to be a cult is something that CEA should be open about in their mistakes page.
Yep, I think CEA has in the past straightforwardly misrepresented (there is a talk on the history of EA by Will and Toby that says some really dubious things here, IIRC) and sometimes even lied in order to not mention Leverage’s history with Effective Altruism. I think this was bad, and continues to be bad.
My initial thought on reading this was ‘this seems obviously bad’, and I assumed this was done to shield CEA from reputational risk.
Thinking about it more, I could imagine an epistemic state I’d be much more sympathetic to: ‘We suspect Leverage is a dangerous cult, but we don’t have enough shareable evidence to make that case convincingly to others, or we aren’t sufficiently confident ourselves. Crediting Leverage for stuff like the EA Summit (without acknowledging our concerns and criticisms) will sound like an endorsement of Leverage, which might cause others to be drawn into its orbit and suffer harm. But we don’t feel confident enough to feel comfortable tarring Leverage in public, or our evidence was shared in confidence and we can’t say anything we expect others to find convincing. So we’ll have to just steer clear of the topic for now.’
Still seems better to just not address the subject if you don’t want to give a fully accurate account of it. You don’t have to give talks on the history of EA!
I think the epistemic state of CEA was some mixture of something pretty close to what you list here, and something that I would put closer to something more like “Leverage maybe is bad, or maybe isn’t, but in any case it looks bad, and I don’t think I want people to think EA or CEA is bad, so we are going to try to avoid any associations between these entities, which will sometimes require stretching the truth”.
That has the collary: “We don’t expect EA’s to care enough about the truth/being transparent that this is a huge reputational risk for us.”
It does look weird to me that CEA doesn’t include this on the mistakes page when they talk about Pareto. I just sent CEA an email to ask:
They wrote back, linking me to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-knowledge-about-leverage-research-1-0?commentId=2QcdhTjqGcSc99sNN
(“we’re working on a couple of updates to the mistakes page, including about this”)
Yep, I think the situation is closer to what Jeff describes here, though, I honestly don’t actually know, since people tend to get cagey when the topic comes up.
I talked with Geoff and according to him there’s no legal contract between CEA and Leverage that prevents information sharing. All information sharing is prevented by organization internal NDA’s.
Huh, that’s surprising, if by that he means “no contracts between anyone currently at Leverage and anyone at CEA”. I currently still think it’s the case, though I also don’t see any reason for Geoff to lie here. Maybe there is some technical sense in which there is no contract between Leverage and CEA, but there are contracts between current Leverage employees, who used to work at CEA, and current CEA employees?
What he said is compatible with Ex-CEA people still being bound by the NDA’s they signed they were at CEA. I don’t think anything happened that releases ex-CEA people from NDAs.
The important thing is that CEA is responsible for those NDA and is free to unilaterally lift them if they would have an interest in the free flow of information. In the case of a settlement with contracts between the two organisations CEA couldn’t unilaterally lift the settlement contract.
Public pressure on CEA seems to be necessary to get the information out in the open.