As someone part of the social communities, I can confirm that Leverage was definitely a topic of discussion for a long time around Rationalists and Effective Altruists. That said, often the discussion went something like, “What’s up with Leverage? They seem so confident, and take in a bunch of employees, but we have very little visibility.” I think I experienced basically the same exact conversation about them around 10 times, along these lines.
As people from Leverage have said, several Rationalists/EAs were very hostile around the topic of Leverage, particularly in the last ~4 years or so. (I’ve heard stories of people getting shouted at just for saying they worked at Leverage at a conference). On the other hand, they definitely had support by a few rationalists/EA orgs and several higher-ups of different kinds.
They’ve always been secretive, and some of the few public threads didn’t go well for them, so it’s not too surprising to me that they’ve had a small LessWrong/EA Forum presence.
I’ve personally very much enjoyed staying mostly staying away from the controversy, though very arguably I made a mistake there.
(I should also note that I had friends who worked at or worked close to Leverage, I attended like 2 events there early on, and I applied to work from there around 6 years ago)
Sorry, edited. I meant that it was a mistake for me to keep away before, not now.
(That said, this post is still quite safe. It’s not like I have scandalous information, more that, technically I (or others) could do more investigation to figure out things better.)
Yeah, at this point, everyone coming together to sort this out together as a way of building a virtuous spiral of making speaking up feel safe enough that it doesn’t even need to be a courageous thing to do or whatever is the kind of thing I think your comment also represents and what I was getting at.
As someone part of the social communities, I can confirm that Leverage was definitely a topic of discussion for a long time around Rationalists and Effective Altruists. That said, often the discussion went something like, “What’s up with Leverage? They seem so confident, and take in a bunch of employees, but we have very little visibility.” I think I experienced basically the same exact conversation about them around 10 times, along these lines.
As people from Leverage have said, several Rationalists/EAs were very hostile around the topic of Leverage, particularly in the last ~4 years or so. (I’ve heard stories of people getting shouted at just for saying they worked at Leverage at a conference). On the other hand, they definitely had support by a few rationalists/EA orgs and several higher-ups of different kinds.
They’ve always been secretive, and some of the few public threads didn’t go well for them, so it’s not too surprising to me that they’ve had a small LessWrong/EA Forum presence.
I’ve personally very much enjoyed staying mostly staying away from the controversy, though very arguably I made a mistake there.
(I should also note that I had friends who worked at or worked close to Leverage, I attended like 2 events there early on, and I applied to work from there around 6 years ago)
For what it’s worth, my opinion is that you sharing your perspective is the opposite of making a mistake.
Sorry, edited. I meant that it was a mistake for me to keep away before, not now.
(That said, this post is still quite safe. It’s not like I have scandalous information, more that, technically I (or others) could do more investigation to figure out things better.)
Yeah, at this point, everyone coming together to sort this out together as a way of building a virtuous spiral of making speaking up feel safe enough that it doesn’t even need to be a courageous thing to do or whatever is the kind of thing I think your comment also represents and what I was getting at.