EA - Research Deprioritizing External Communication by Jeff Kaufman

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Research Deprioritizing External Communication, published by Jeff Kaufman on October 6, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This was originally written in December 2021. I think it's good practice to run posts by orgs before making them public, and I did in this case. This has some benefits: orgs aren't surprised, they can prepare a response in advance if they want to, they can point out errors before things become public, etc, and I think it's generally worth doing. In this case Leverage folks pointed out some errors, omissions, and bad phrasing in my post, which I've fixed, and I'm thankful for their help. Pre-publication review does also have downsides, however, and in this case as the email conversations grew to 10k+ words over three weeks I ran out of time and motivation. A month ago I came across this in my list of blog drafts and decided to publish it as-is with a note at the top explaining the situation. This means that it doesn't cover any more recent Leverage developments, including their Experiences Inquiry Report and On Intention Research paper, both published in April 2022. I shared this post again with Leverage, and while I've made edits in response to their feedback they continue to disagree with my conclusion. In the original pre-publication discussion with Geoff, one of the topics was whether we could make our disagreement more concrete with a bet. For example, research that launches a new subfield generally gets lots of citations, such as the the Concrete Problems paper (1,644 citations at 6 years), and if Leverage 1.0's research ends up having this kind of foundational impact this could be a clear way to tell. When I gave Leverage a second pre-publication heads up, Geoff and I talked more and we were able to nail down some terms: if a Leverage paper drawing primarily on their pre-2019 research has 100+ citations from people who've never worked for Leverage by 2032-10-01, then I'll donate $100 to a charity of Geoff's choosing; if not then Geoff will do the same for a charity of my choosing. I've listed this on my bets page. In 2011, several people I knew through Boston-area effective altruism and rationality meetups started an organization called Leverage Research. Their initial goal was to "make the world a much better place, using the most effective means we can", and they worked on a wide range of projects, but they're probably best known for trying to figure out how to make people more productive/capable/successful by better understanding how people think and interact. They initially lived and worked in a series of shared houses, first in Brooklyn and then in Oakland; I visited the latter for an evening in early 2014. The core project ("Leverage 1.0") disintegrated in 2019, with some portions continuing, including Paradigm (training/coaching) and Leverage 2.0 (early stage science). In this post I'm only looking at Leverage 1.0, and specifically at their psychology research program. In mid-December 2021, Leverage's former head of operations, Cathleen, wrote In Defense of Attempting Hard Things: and my story of the Leverage ecosystem (LW comments), giving a detailed history with extensive thoughts on many aspects of the project. I remember her positively from my short 2014 visit, and I'm really glad she took the time to write this up. There are many directions from which people could approach Leverage 1.0, but the one that I'm most interested in is lessons for people considering attempting similar things in the future. My overall read of Cathleen's post is that she (and many other ex-Leverage folks) view the project as one where a group of people took an unorthodox approach to research, making many deep and important discoveries about how people think and relate to each other. I've read the Connection Theory paper and the four research reports G...