From the side of EA, the CEA, and the side of the rationality community, largely CFAR, Leverage faced efforts to be shoved out of both within a short order of a couple of years. Both EA and CFAR thus couldn't have then, and couldn't now, say or do more to disown and disavow Leverage's practices from the time Leverage existed under the umbrella of either network/ecosystem/whatever…

At the time of the events as presented by Zoe Curzi in those posts, Leverage was basically shoved out the door of both the rationality and EA communities with--to put it bluntly--the door hitting Leverage on ass on the on the way out, and the door back in firmly locked behind them from the inside. 

While I’m not claiming that “practices at Leverage” should be “attributed to either the rationality or EA communities”, or to CEA, the take above is demonstrably false. CEA definitely could have done more to “disown and disavow Leverage’s practices” and also reneged on commitments that would have helped other EAs learn about problems with Leverage. 

Circa 2018 CEA was literally supporting Leverage/Paradigm on an EA community building strategy event. In August 2018 (right in the middle of the 2017-2019 period at Leverage that Zoe Curzi described in her post), CEA supported and participated in an “EA Summit” that was incubated by Paradigm Academy (intimately associated with Leverage). “Three CEA staff members attended the conference” and the keynote was delivered by a senior CEA staff member (Kerry Vaughan). Tara MacAulay, who was CEO of CEA until stepping down less than a year before the summit to co-found Alameda Research, personally helped fund the summit.

At the time, “the fact that Paradigm incubated the Summit and Paradigm is connected to Leverage led some members of the community to express concern or confusion about the relationship between Leverage and the EA community.” To address those concerns, Kerry committed to “address this in a separate post in the near future.” This commitment was subsequently dropped with no explanation other than “We decided not to work on this post at this time.”

This whole affair was reminiscent of CEA’s actions around the 2016 Pareto Fellowship, a CEA program where ~20 fellows lived in the Leverage house (which they weren’t told about beforehand), “training was mostly based on Leverage ideas”, and “some of the content was taught by Leverage staff and some by CEA staff who were very 'in Leverage's orbit'.” When CEA was fundraising at the end of that year, a community member mentioned that they’d heard rumors about a lack of professionalism at Pareto. CEA staff replied, on multiple occasions, that “a detailed review of the Pareto Fellowship is forthcoming.” This review was never produced. 

Several years later, details emerged about Pareto’s interview process (which nearly 500 applicants went through) that confirmed the rumors about unprofessional behavior. One participant described it as “one of the strangest, most uncomfortable experiences I've had over several years of being involved in EA…  It seemed like unscientific, crackpot psychology…  it felt extremely cultish… The experience left me feeling humiliated and manipulated.” 

I’ll also note that CEA eventually added a section to its mistakes page about Leverage, but not until 2022, and only after Zoe had published her posts and a commenter on Less Wrong explicitly asked why the mistakes page didn’t mention Leverage’s involvement in the Pareto Fellowship. The mistakes page now acknowledges other aspects of the Leverage/CEA relationship, including that Leverage had “a table at the careers fair at EA Global several times.” Notably, CEA has never publicly stated that working with Leverage was a mistake or that Leverage is problematic in any way.

The problems at Leverage were Leverage’s fault, not CEA’s. But CEA could have, and should have, done more to distance EA from Leverage.

Very interesting, thanks so much for doing this!

I dunno, I think a funder that had a goal and mindset of funding EA community building could just do stuff like fund cause-agnostic EAGs and a maintenance of a cause-agnostic effectivealtruism.org, and nor really worry about things like the relative cost-effectiveness of GCR community building vs. GHW community building.

Some Prisoners Dilemma dynamics are at play here, but there are some important differences (at least from the standard PD setup). 

• The PD setup pre-supposes guilt, which really isn’t appropriate in this case. An investigation should be trying to follow the facts wherever they lead. It’s perfectly plausible that, for example, an investigation could find that reasonable actions were taken after the Slack warning, that there were good reasons for not publicly discussing the existence or specifics of those actions, and that there really isn’t much to learn from the Slack incident. I personally think other findings are more likely, but the whole rationale for an independent investigation is that people shouldn’t have to speculate about questions we can answer empirically.
• People who aren’t “guilty” could “defect” and do so in a way where they wouldn’t be able to be identified. For example, take someone from the EA leaders Slack group who nobody would expect to be responsible for following up about the SBF warnings posted in that group. That person could provide investigators a) a list of leaders in the group who could reasonably be expected to follow-up and b) which of those people acknowledged seeing the Slack warnings. They could do so without compromising their identity. The person who discussed the Slack warnings with the New Yorker reporter basically followed this template.
• Re: your comment that “if other prisoners strongly oppose cooperation, they may find a way to collectively punish those who do defect”, this presumably doesn’t apply to people who have already “defected”. For instance, if Tara has a paper trail of the allegations she raised during the Alameda dispute and shared that with investigators, I doubt that would burn any more bridges with EA leadership than she’s already burned. 

I agree this would be a big challenge. A few thoughts…

• An independent investigation would probably make some people more likely to share what they know. It could credibly offer them anonymity while still granting proper weight to their specific situation and access to information(unlike posting something via a burner account, which would be anonymous but less credible). I imagine contributing to a formal investigation would feel more comfortable to a lot of people than weighing in on forum discussions like this one.
• People might be incentivized to participate out of a desire not to have the investigation publicly report “person X declined to participate”. I don’t think publicly reporting that would be appropriate in all cases where someone declined to participate, but I would support that in cases where the investigation had strong reasons to believe the lack of participation stemmed from someone wanting to obscure their own problematic behavior. (I don’t claim to know exactly where to draw the line for this sort of thing).
• To encourage participation, I think it would be good to have CEA play a role in facilitating and/or endorsing (though maybe not conducting) the investigation. While this would compromise its independence to some degree, that would probably be worth it to provide a sort of “official stamp of approval”. That said, I would still hope other steps would be taken to help mitigate that compromise of independence.  
• As others have noted, some people would likely view participation as the right thing to do.

Have you directly asked these people if they're interested (in the headhunting task)? It's sort of a lot to just put something like this on someone's plate (and it doesn't feel to me like a-thing-they've-implicitly-signed-up-for-by-taking-their-role).

I have not. While nobody in EA leadership has weighed in on this explicitly, the general vibe I get is “we don’t need an investigation, and in any case it’d be hard to conduct and we’d need to fund it somehow.” So I’m focusing on arguing the need for an investigation, because without that the other points are moot. And my assumption is that if we build sufficient consensus on the need for an investigation, we could sort out the other issues. If leaders think an investigation is warranted but the logistical problems are insurmountable, they should make that case and then we can get to work on seeing if we can actually solve those logistical problems.

surely the investigation should have remit to add questions as it goes if they're warranted by information it's turned up?

Yeah, absolutely. What I had in mind when I wrote this was this excerpt from an outstanding comment from Jason on the Mintz investigation; I’d hope these ideas could help inform the structure of a future investigation:

How The Investigation Could Have Actually Rebuilt Lost Trust and Confidence

There was a more transparent / credible way to do this. EVF could have released, in advance, an appropriate range of specific questions upon which the external investigator was being asked to make findings of fact -- as well as a set of possible responses (on a scale of "investigation rules this out with very high confidence" to "investigation shows this is almost certain"). For example -- and these would probably have several subquestions each -- one could announce in advance that the following questions were in scope and that the investigator had committed to providing specific answers:

• Did anyone associated with EVF ever raise concerns about SBF being engaged in fraudulent activity? Did they ever receive any such concerns?
• Did anyone associated with EVF discourage, threaten, or seek to silence any person who had concerns about illegal, unethical, or fraudulent conduct by SBF? (cf. the "Will basically threatened Tara" report).
• When viewed against the generally-accepted norms for donor vetting in nonprofits, was anyone associated with EVF negligent, grossly negligent, or reckless in evaluating SBF's suitability as a donor, failing to raise concerns about his suitability, or choosing not to conduct further investigation?

That kind of pre-commitment would have updated my faith in the process, and my confidence that the investigation reached all important topics. If EVF chose not to release the answers to those questions, it would have known that we could easily draw the appropriate inferences. Under those circumstances -- but not the actual circumstances -- I would view willingness to investigate as a valuable signal.

As of February 2021:

Here’s an update from CEA's operations team, which has been working on updating our practices for handling donations. This also applies to other organizations that are legally within CEA (80,000 Hours, Giving What We Can, Forethought Foundation, and EA Funds).

• “We are working with our lawyers to devise and implement an overarching policy for due diligence on all of our donors and donations going forward.
• We've engaged a third party who now conducts KYC (know your client) due diligence research on all major donors (>$20K a year).
• We have established a working relationship with TRM who conduct compliance and back-tracing for all crypto donations.”

I honestly doubt that this process would have, or should have, flagged anything about SBF. But I can imagine it helping in other cases, and I think it’s important for CEA to actually be following its stated procedures.

I hope that the “overarching policy for due diligence on all of our donors” that was put together post-Delo in 2021 was well designed. But it’s also worth noting Zach has also discussed “increasing the rigor of donor due diligence” in 2023. Maybe the 2023 improvements took the process from good to great. Maybe they suggest that the 2021 policies weren’t very good. It’d be great for the new and improved policy, and how it differs from the previous policy, to be shared (as Zach has suggested it will be) so other orgs can leverage it and to help the entire community understand what specific improvements have been made post-FTX.